“Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…'”
(written in Coptic on a fragment of papyrus revealed in Rome, 2012)
Yes, the child I bore became a man,
a married man.
She was brazen and cold—not right for Him.
I tried to accept her.
God knows, I tried.
She blamed me for His grandiosity, His claims of Divinity.
Me, Mary, Most Holy,
Mother of God.
Jane Attanucci’s poems have been published in the Aurorean, Off the Coast, Right Hand Pointing, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, among others. She received the New England Poetry Club’s Barbara Bradley Award in 2014. Her chapbook, First Mud (a finalist in the Blast Furnace Contest, 2014), was released by Finishing Line Press in 2015. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.