Fletch Fletcher

Fletch Fletcher is science teacher, a poet, a brother, a friend, and an observer of how all people connect to others and the world they inhabit.

Before Confession #835

Do you count the birthdays of secrets,  

memorialize and idealize their flailing  

youth, their rebellious adolescence, the slow march  

into middle age  

where they settle into your skin  

like routine  and wait to die?  

Do you know the orbit of secrets, the time  

it takes them to see every shining side  

of you, the speed at which they sow and reap  

and hunker down for the long cold that comes  

with biting winds?  

Do you remember how you felt  

when your skin was open sky,  

untilled plains,  

clean and free  

of headstones?

Please, Not Confession #835

Please, 

kiss the open lips of this 

lie and leave 

before the end.

I drew monsters 

in margins to keep 

truths I need to love

truths I need to love 

me

truths I refuse 

to map.

Please,

do not get close 

to my edges.

There be dragons 

afraid of their fire.

Leave Confession #835 Alone

Harsh reds touch walls 

around me. 

Be the bull. 

I do it and become 

cliché. 

The plastic strikes the ground. Disunity 

and clatter.

It isn’t always my blood. 

We shouldn’t want this. 

Leave me my pain. 

Let me inflict on the air 

until there is nothing 

to breathe. 

Don’t touch the raw hole 

of this. 

I bite when touched. 

Even in tenderness. 

I don’t want to.

Not Confession #835

This place has four waterfall walls.

Rivers flow from all six cardinal directions they spit

themselves back into their bodies. The center,

Halley teaches, has the stars in circle pirouettes

about each other. This is less a place

than a trout. More a grizzly and I am

the trout ever jumping for the left-front tooth, except

there are no confessions in fins like I bring to bury

in the ratites feathers. I tell you

I am lonely,

and you are not shocked. I whisper

here, knelt to the coyote’s ear,

I know why I deserve it

and still you are not shocked.