Poetry – Kathryn Reese

Post vespers 

After MG. 

If prayer persists, it’s primitive reflex.       Reflux.         A regurgitation. 

           If prayer persists it’s because solutions do sometimes fall from the sky—NaCl, acid rain—

your breath might still slow their descent. 

                                       If prayer persists, it’s a rare species of frog burrowed in your throat,  

   surviving both drought and saturation.

                            It’s just the tongue’s instinct for preservation.       A language 

is lost every fourteen days.                                    You fast forty days.    

    Prayer is counting the words that dry on your desert lips. 

If prayer persists—it’s a moment of being held, suspended, swung before immersion in the river. 

        Your cousin’s hand at your wrist. This is not exactly safe. 

             If prayer persists it’s a gasp for air as you swim up from sweat-drenched bedclothes, 

nightmare—or love—stuck in your neck. 

                          If prayer persists it’s only echoes of the incantation whispered when your head was                white with vernix and your legs meconium green.   That magic spell: 

               you’re beautiful, 

                       you’re mine,

                          you’re divine. 

                If your prayer persists it means you aspirated during baptism, and all the red wine spilt on 

your white shirt since cannot wash it down. 

     If prayer persists it’s a snatch of a song. An ear-worm. 

Some parasitic fluke boring holes in your heart. 

     Or it means you swallowed a watermelon seed and now 

a vine winds itself through your hepatic portal vein. 

     Or it’s just reverberation of fatty acids metabolised by microflora 

blooming along your gut, activating a nervous hyper-sensitivity 

to phytoestrogens. You’re not a girl anymore. Take this

square of dark chocolate and this fist full of earth. 

            you’re beautiful, you’re dirt, you’re divine.