The Holy See

By Jane Zwart

Some visit the Sistine Chapel
to stand under the thumb of God 

and some to see the raised saints
somersaulting out of their clothes

and tumbling, splendid, naked,
up the altar wall. There they are:

Peter, a grim homesteader, rousted
from bed and handed a sawed-off;

John the Baptist in a camel hair
Speedo, turning his unaffected neck

in the direction of Christ’s spooked
arms. And there Saint Catherine

as a sailor’s sextant: in a lettuce camisole
and borrowed shoulders, she lowers

an arc broken from her wheel.
The crowd in the Vatican mingle

with the damned, and Michelangelo—

his slack visage is a windbreaker’s hood
snapped to Bartholomew’s dermis.

But even outside the Holy See,

the holy see. There is Franscesca,
patron of Rome’s rim shops, changing

halos, our lady of the hubcap
aureole, and there a defrocked priest pressing

passers-by to buy a photo of an American
icon: Saint Sebastian as Utility Pole.

Look here, he says, everywhere we stand
we are under the thumb of God.

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Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines. In addition, she is the co-editor of book reviews for Plume.