192026-09-20

The Year We Stopped Setting a Place for Him

There 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.

Prose poem Faith Loss

Chosen for Small Prayers by Nadia Osei

Critiques

Nadia Osei2026-09-20

The ledger image at the end is doing real work, but it arrives suddenly for a poem that has otherwise moved through very concrete objects — the extra plate, the number five, the chair. I'd want one more concrete beat between "somehow" and the ledger, something as physical as the plate, so the abstraction has something to stand on instead of closing the poem on its own.

Short notes

None.