Prayer for an August Morning

Photo by Liliana Del Rosso on Unsplash


I, unaccountably, love vultures.
Shy and overly friendly,
they’ll carefully pluck the buttons from your shirt.
No really, it happened to me.
Well, it was only one button.

Gaining a vulture’s trust takes time.
In the heat of a late August morning
try a hose that sprays cool water
under their wings and across their heavy chests.
Afterwards, glistening wings held wide,
the vulture will smile.
Head tilted just so; his beak left slightly ajar;
his black eyes rolling in ecstasy.

But I digress…
I always digress.
The slow presence of prayer 
and the slow drying of the vulture’s wings.
These are only talismans.
Against what— I can no longer tell.
Against the loss of memory?

But I want to forget God.
As if he had simply walked away
from the world
on that August morning
while I was bathing the vultures.

Published on The Laundry Line, April 8th, 2025

Supplication

Supplication

We need a patron saint for the banana boxes 
	that they pack your groceries in down at Costco,
… 	for boys in backwards ball caps,
… 	for velcro shoes and old men with wraparound sunglasses.
We need a patron saint for poets 
	the ones without faith and the ones with scars from teenage acne, 
… 	for body oil, pipe bombs, and transdermal nicotine,
… 	for every Mexican cab driver who has ever gotten me safely 
	to my destination in spite of my inability 
	to correctly pronounce colonia,
… 	for the brown and white saddle shoes my mother wore in high school.
We need a patron saint for the tumbling worded prayers of children 
	who mistake God for Good,
… 	for the space between Holy and Whole Foods,
… 	for anaphor, onomatopoeia, and the cultural references 
	to the 1970’s in the New York Times crossword puzzle. 
We need a patron saint for days when the sun shines 
	slantwise and the dogs lie down 
	in the dust behind the barns.
We need a patron saint for small stakes gambling, 
… 	for unacknowledged acts of contrition,
… 	for the places that angels cannot go because 
	their wings do not fit.

Originally pub­lished on The Laundry Line, March 25, 2025

Pittsburgh

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Pittsburgh 

A creased wedding photograph of a woman.
A Mass Card when she passes.
The facts of her life
support no further conclusions.
About the necessity of ambulances.
The man who held 
her in his childish embrace.
She is the silence that avalanches down to
a mute son with too many mothers.
Not enough uncles to help put the pigs back
into the sties. 
On Friday night after the football game. 
Teenage boys lick the lipgloss 
off of the head cheerleader.
She is the fact of a ride up to the cemetery.
Her grandfather tumbles down with the cicadas.
She is the silent face of  
a younger brother who collapses.
The folding chairs and carries them to the 
attic full of trunks and shoe boxes. 
The shoes from her other life.
She is the silence, a crimson wedge.
Cheese rind made of ash 
from the steel furnaces that
soot the city.
We can say no more.

Published on The Laundry Line, 18 March 2025