“Poem After Francis Bacon’s ‘Study After Pope Innocent X by Velasquez’”
by Virgil Suárez

He sits there to ponder what he has just been told will be his fate as soon as he dies and they take his vital organs

and put them in mason jars and bury them next to him in that place where they’ve buried all other popes. One

hand claws tight the armrest, because this chair, this life has been like a cage. What isn’t innocent about his name

any longer is the fact that he’s known all the church’s dirty secrets jarred and pickled through the ages. The catacombs

await him with a smile, he thinks and his eyes turn to stone behind his wire-frame glasses. He will swallow a mango

seed in hope he will serve as its fertilizer. It will sprout right there in the dark of his plot, and grow into a twisted,

bitter-root tree. In the spring of his first year dead, it will birth one fruit. In it the rotten meat of all human vanities.

He sits there turning slightly toward such dank, dark secrets.

Ontario Review #56