Praying inside the emergency
Ladies of Pyrex and cornucopias,
we meet in the evening,
in circled chairs and cradling
leather Bibles. We open our arms
to hug, breath sweet and tart
as a cooled mug of tea. Our meeting
is long and about Jesus,
and I marvel how his parables land
close to my ear, not exactly,
but I mistrust perfection. When
one of us asks for prayer concerns,
at first we look at our hands
and feet, those body parts
crafted for earthly labor,
but then at last we name them,
the illness fresh or ongoing,
the errant cell, the off-tempo heart.
We pray for consults and MRIs,
for children launching off precipices,
their panic attacks and their
contraband, our kids who are
suckers for every kind of pain,
pain and its sucking sound against
their candied child-hearts. As though
in speaking our intentions
to each other we talk to God,
we pray for diabetic coworkers,
the neighbor whose Alzheimer’s
stole his language, Chile, the Congo,
for pain felt a hemisphere away,
and finally, the kin of people
who have died in car accidents
in our town and on our roads —
pain’s purest signifier, Grade-A
sweet pain, edge of the cut pain,
the sick roulette of a Tuesday.
I’m alive, and after this prayer
ends, I pray my bones won’t
obstinately crack on every hard
surface in town, bucolic lampposts
demanding my sacrifice,
half-whisper of my prayer
hemming me toward the buzz
of those praying for me,
as though by speaking my own fears,
I manifest them. I pray, a speck
too scientific to believe in prayer
as more than mass hallucination,
the way ancient people offered herbs,
tokens, the fine-boned carcasses
of birds, imagined an entity
to collect them. I pray because
I can’t bend social orders
let alone my own diminutive life
to my will, and I have bent so hard
that I broke myself, on protest
and on that most ethereal of wishes,
the vote. Instead of God, then
I pled with all of humanity. Now
I perform small charities, like not
being a shit in what ways the day
offers. I pray, and in my prayer admit
that in every hardship, to act
might take the form of rage, but
also joy, blinking in the heated room,
the snarl of someone’s stomach,
an Amen for every improbable
holy body. I pray, may we rise.