Lance Larsen
“Everything Is a Prayer to Something”

Lance Larsen - “Everything Is a Prayer to Something”

Poetry
Lance Larsen is the author of five poetry collections, most recently What the Body Knows (Tampa 2018). He’s won a number of awards, including a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Sewanee, Ragdale,… Read more »
Hannah Whiteman
Callinectes Sapidus

Hannah Whiteman - Callinectes Sapidus

Poetry
"Set in Maryland" Contest Winner Hannah Whiteman received her MFA from the University of Florida. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she teaches English. Read more »
Ed Meek
Climate Change

Ed Meek - Climate Change

Poetry
Ed Meek has had poems in The American Poetry Journal, The Sun, Plume, and The Paris Review. His new book, High Tide, is available at Aubadepublishing.com. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with… Read more »
Charlie Clark
Devil Watching as, in the Midst of Your Isolation, Your Child Insists on Opening All of Her Umbrellas

Charlie Clark - Devil Watching as, in the Midst of Your Isolation, Your Child Insists on Opening All of Her Umbrellas

Poetry
Charlie Clark studied poetry at the University of Maryland. His work has appeared in The New England Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Smartish Pace, Threepenny Review, West Branch, and other journals.… Read more »

“Everything Is a Prayer to Something”

Lance Larsen

     — overheard in the produce section at Kroger’s Pears are a prayer to smooth, parsley a prayer to leafy doubt, kiwis a prayer to what fits in the fist, a bristliness almost marsupial. Driving home is a prayer to stop sign and crosswalk with the sun streaming in on the sly like a third-grader telling a first-grader how adults commit parenthood. The sheets flapping on the line are a prayer to wind, lemonade stands a prayer to summer and sticky quarters, baby teeth a prayer to white. My mother saved my teeth in a Sucrets tin, and at night I’d shake them under the blanket, a prayer to morning, may it come quickly, a rattling like muffled rain. And why not let it rain in a grapefruit orchard in late August outside Ventura? We picked and picked and afterwards in the kitchen my mother performed her alchemy. One moment she cradled a grapefruit as big as a softball. The next she held a dripping pink globe in her left hand, and from her right hung a sliced peel, all in one piece, like a skinned rattlesnake, which she nibbled at, each scrape of her teeth a prayer to thrift, a prayer to scrimp and stave off and thank you and the Great Depression, which she was a helpless child of. She washed dishes the same way, we all did, no dishwasher in our house, each swipe of the washrag was Dear Lord, each clean glass hallelujah—until I reached into the dirty suds for a saucer one night and grabbed a butcher knife instead. Is this how it’s done, Lord? Is this how you slice us open for our own good? What gushed forth was a prayer to this life not the next, what dripped across the floor were little prayers to what comes next, a dot-to-dot from kitchen to bathroom, which the cat lapped up, then sat on her haunches, asking for more.
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