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Prayer in a Language I'm Forgetting

29 September 2026

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I still know the shape of the prayer, the way the body folds and rises, the cool of the floor against my forehead. It is the words that are going. They loosen a little each year, like a hem. I say them now the way you hum a song whose verses you have lost — carried by the melody, trusting my mouth to remember what my mind no longer holds. God, if you are listening, I hope you grade on intention. I hope the bowing counts. I hope the ache in the right place is its own kind of fluent.

Prose poem Faith

About the prose poemA poem set as a block of prose, with no line breaks.

A prose poem looks like a paragraph and is written in sentences, without line breaks. It still works as a poem, through image, rhythm, sound and compression. Without the line break to shape its pace, the sentences carry it.

The shape Written in sentences, set as a paragraph, with no line breaks.

Listen for How sentences, rather than line breaks, set the pace and where the poem pauses.

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@noor

Home is a word she's had to redefine more than once.

6 poems · 3 readings received · 3 written · 0 followers

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Matched by shared theme or form. Where two match equally, the one still waiting for a first reading comes first.

A Letter to Whoever Is Running ThisKai Moreno“To whoever is running this: I am not writing to complain. I want that on the record first, because everyone writes to you to complain, and you must be so tired of the mail. I am writing to say that the pomegranate is ridiculous. That you did not have to make the inside look like that. That a thing we eat could have been plain, could have been a potato, and instead it is a chandelier of small red rooms, and no one asked you to, and you did it anyway. I am writing to say I noticed. I am writing to say that if this is all there is — the pomegranate, the light on the taxis, the particular person asleep in the other room breathing like the tide coming in — then it was, on balance, worth the trouble of existing, and I withdraw, provisionally, every complaint I have not yet sent.”Faith · Prose poem The Inventory of Small MerciesKai Moreno“Some days the mercy is small and you have to look for it. A dog that decides you are worth crossing the road for. The bus that waits. The stranger who says take your time, and means it, in a country not built for taking time. I keep a list because I am the kind of person who forgets, by evening, that the morning was survivable. Item: the way the light came through the one clean window. Item: that no one, today, asked me how I was really doing, which was itself a mercy, because I did not have the answer folded small enough to hand across a counter. Item: I was, at three in the afternoon, for the length of one song in a corner shop, completely and stupidly happy, and did not question it — which is the rarest item, the one I am always losing, the one I write down first.”Prose poem My Mother's Recipe for Caldo de PolloMarisol Vega“My mother's recipe has no measurements, only gestures: a palm of salt, a handful meaning however much your hand happens to hold that day, which is not a stable unit of measurement, which is the entire problem with trying to write any of this down. I have tried for years to translate her kitchen into something a stranger could follow, and every time I fail at the exact same place: the moment she tastes the broth and adjusts it by something other than taste, some private arithmetic involving who is coming to dinner, what kind of day everyone has had, whether anyone needs forgiving. You cannot measure that. I have her handwriting on an index card that says simply "hasta que esté bueno," until it's good, and I used to think that was her being imprecise, and now, older, standing in my own kitchen guessing, I understand it was the only honest instruction she ever could have given me.”Prose poem