Listen to Jose Oseguera read “Ode to the Foreskin” from Shō No. 5 (Summer 2024).
About this poem: In this poem, I meditate on the foreskin as a symbol of fragility, ancestral protection, and the body’s first encounter with violence—an aspect of male vulnerability that I feel is often hidden or dismissed in society. Inspired by Sharon Olds, I mourn an early loss while blurring the line between the physical and the spiritual, tracing how innocence can be severed even before memory begins.
Jose Oseguera is an LA-based writer of poetry, short fiction and literary nonfiction. His writing has been featured in Sky Island Journal, Meat for Tea, and Catamaran. He is the author of the poetry collections The Milk of Your Blood (2021) as well as And This House is Only a Nest (2024).
