Prayer

Grace Lynn

When you arrive in this city, you will see

it’s a different type of tactile we speak. 

Not sign language per se. No sunlight  

here pours the music academy child’s

voice from the throat crying 

wolf and Miss Manners clipped  

from pages right-bright with Eloise. 

If the locals say we haunt the jungle 

with our clandestine cells, how true 

this would be. Here, wind picks up

our lives and displaces them 

at a distance from they were otherwise 

meant to be. But it’s best to play dead 

with nursery rhymes cool 

as ice cubes in the mouth, ghosts 

of our springer spaniel licking 

the toes, our empty juice boxes, 

our plastic knives ridding the crust 

from our baloney on rye, 

scratch magic, red on blue ink 

cross-out mess of Mad Libs

and swirling rainbow-milk bowls 

where our fruity pebbles 

once-upon-a-timed. 

Now, she steadies my body 

like a puppet requiring the most 

delicate adjustments of its strings 

with the zephyr-touch 

of a palm between the blades, 

a gesture that makes me want 

to breathe, even into vandalized 

interstitial waves of pain. Every so often, 

I give a little for the whole lot I take, 

knit my fingers into the pockets 

between hers like a pastiche 

of time-lapse lymph: sunspots, arthritis, 

wrinkles, tremors, carefree kinked 

careworn. We tangle this way each night

when darkness nets us 

in its petrified amber.

We make an altar 

out of the pitch-black 

silence that binds 

two knowing hands.