Please join Synkroniciti in welcoming back Jonathan Fletcher, a Peruvian-American poet raised in Texas. HIs poetry explores family with a deep awareness of ancestry and the bifurcation that grows out of a history of colonization. “No Saltes, Mijo,” in English Don’t jump, dear, is a personal poem which shows us how language can create family and save lives. “Had you said the same thing/ to me in English, I doubt/ I’d have stepped away from the ledge…” The simple vulnerability of these three stanzas is irresistible. “Horsemen of the Apocalypse” takes us back in time to the arrival of Spaniards on Incan soil and the subsequent genocide and expunging of a rival culture. “Though no gods yourselves,/ you behaved like the one/ from your Scriptures—/ expected, demanded/ offerings, more offerings.// Even Inti didn’t ask like that.” The failure to see other cultures as human and treat them with respect is, ultimately, the downfall of Western “civilization.” We continue with “Mummies,” a dialogue with an Incan mummy preserved in ice for centuries. “Tell me who I am,/ where I’m from,/ what I’m missing.” The final poem is “Fish on Fridays,” which delves into the tradition of eating fish on Fridays during Lent which he shared with his mother for many years. He struggles to separate his love for her from the ambivalence he feels toward the Catholic Christianity of his youth and finds he cannot completely do so. The double-edged sword of colonialism is that it gives descendants tools to succeed in life: Spanish, English, religious faith and more, while tainting those tools with rage and self-loathing because they were taken from the oppressor in order to survive. The airing of these grievances is important if there is to be healing of ancestral trauma, and Jonathan handles them with intelligence and a nobility of spirit that is transcendent and compelling.
Read Jonathan’s enlightening poetry in our “Family” issue, available at https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Originally from San Antonio, Texas, Jonathan Fletcher has been rejected 276 times from various literary journals and magazines. Inexplicably, he won Northwestern University Press’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Somehow, he also made it through Columbia University School of the Arts, from which he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in Poetry in 2023.