Stabat Mater

[Nashville, TN]

Sometimes,
in the checkout line

I’d see them staring
at the eight of us.

Sometimes they’d ask you

—are these all yours?

In the meantime,

the folding
of socks and hands,

hot dogs and macaroni,

the way light leaned through the kitchen
at midafternoon

when you’d stand at the sink

thinking something
that must have been hard.

One Sunday, at Shoney’s,
after Mass, I saw it—

You looking down, seeing something
hard to see. Dad looking out

toward the van. Mouth set.
Hands tight—that light

in the emptiness between.

When we went to Mass,

I tried hard not to think
of impure things.

It was difficult though
in that light,

always tired, always
yellowed and leaning

sideways across

the pale soles and napes
in the forward pew.

Above, the blank-
faced statues of Saints

I could only tell apart

by the instruments of their murders
they held aloft—

Simon with his saw,
Lawrence’s grill-grate,

Bartholomew’s curtain
of fresh-flayed skin—

Like souvenirs. Like passports.

Late winter
of freshman year,

I spent all week spitting in a cup

so I could wrestle at State
at 103.

In the faint-headed blank
fluorescent air

of some Murfreesboro gym,

I watched an older boy, muscle-
bound, head shaven

to the skin, move suddenly
into—and entirely through—

another boy.

The crowd seemed
surprised

at that wet sound

of flesh, its own
unwilled roar—

like some sort of solution.

I don’t remember
telling you goodbye

for the first deployment—just

a wince of brakes
at Departures,

rain swallowing the curb.

Not knowing how
to hold my face,

then turning
through sliding glass,

choking back tears
near some Burger King kiosk.

What I remember best, though
is those engines

spooling
compacted air,

that wash of pure sound—

Benjamin Bellet is clinical psychologist and military veteran. After leaving active duty in the US Army, he earned a PhD in clinical psychology at Harvard University. He now treats young adults with serious mental illness in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the winner of the Poetry Prize in the 2024 Armed Services Arts Partnership Anthology, a 2025 Pushcart Prize nominee, and the winner of second place in the 2024 Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Award contest. His poems have also been published in the Colorado Review, MAYDAY Magazine, Peripheries, and elsewhere. IG: @benbellet; X: @BenjaminBellet2.