Read the poem ‘Transplantsubstantiation’ by Gus Peterson

This week’s poem, by Gus Peterson, offers us the sometimes-sacred grace of a commonest and worst-for-us food–especially to one who never expected to eat it again. I love this poem’s beatific reveries over salt, fryolator oil, and potato, and its clear love for the precious senses — for the life — that finds such rapture in them.

Gus Peterson lives and writes close to the Kennebec river in Randolph in a house he shares with his wife. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming with The Shore, Verse Daily, Frost Meadow Review, and Comstock Review. His debut collection, Male Pattern, was published this spring by Finishing Line Press.

Transplantsubstantiation

The first commandment we broke
from the aftercare bible
was a large order of fries
because what could taste better
than a forbidden thing
you thought you’d never relish again?
That first fry not eighty days
after the nurse hoisted the cloudy bag
of cells, its new immune system:
do you want it blessed?
Tell me, isn’t this what prayer is,
eyes closed, pillars of salt collapsed
to just born buds? Can’t this be
creation, this baptism of heat, of oil?
How it travels downriver to us in
a basket. If He is everywhere,
then why not here, this roadside
chapel just seconds off I-95,
why not these holy men and women
all garbed alike, the drive thru crackle
sermonizing summer’s heavy air?
Is it a sin, worshipping this pleasure
bundled like a sheave of golden rushes?
Its food safe ark. If a body can be
bread, can be a cracker pressed
flat and flavorless to tongue,
then let this extravagance of calories
be a new communion, each word
intone like a psalm of potato pulled
from its featureless dirt plot.
I watch you chew and remember
the last drop of solution joining
your blood, a whole choir of scrubs
gathered, happy birthday in our ears.
A small slice of cake, its unlit
candle. How, despite the cannula
set like a bridle in your nose,
the desperate tangle of tubes reining

over the bed, you still sat up,
still leaned forward to gather what
breath you could. Silence’s noise
before you blew that lightless
light out.

– Gus Peterson

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Transplantsubstantiation,” ©2026 by Gus Peterson, appears by permission of the author.

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