Collection
Small Prayers
Faith as habit, inheritance and argument, not as certainty.
00Villanelle for the Unanswered PrayerYou do not answer, and I keep asking anyway.
The silence has its own liturgy by now —1 critique01What My Mother Prayed in the Other LanguageShe prayed in the language I was taught to lose,
soft in the kitchen, before the six o'clock news.1 critique02The Year We Stopped Setting a Place for HimThere is a year, and then there is the year after, and somewhere between them a hand stops reaching for the extra plate without anyone deciding it should. Nobody announced it. My mother simply set the table for five instead of six, and none of us said the number out loud, because saying it would have made the empty chair a subject instead of a fact. I used to think faith meant believing he was somewhere. Now I think it means setting five places and trusting that the missing one still counts, somehow, in a ledger none of us can read.1 critique