Eighteen of Fifty

The posture of prayer denies my knees their wish of frivolity.
My grandmothers willed their rheumatism to my mother,
who shattered its christening bottle over me.

We’d all hit the kneeling bench, groaning,
a pudgy row of thigh eclairs over brittle candy shell kneecaps,
over the inflamed cracking of which breasts, lips, hairdo
have no palpable being to their mistresses,
over which we clench a doublefist altar of hands, before
opening the covenant with thanks, in a half-sipped breath confusing
the confession with a desire for arthroscopic surgery, the same
fear of the diagnosis, the same humiliation at the nudity
of our indulged bodies, the same naïve relief
at giving our skin and pockets to the healer and his knives…

But we don’t pray that way, we wives and
daughters of restoration deacons. We pray on
our butts, on our right sides sleepfalling, in the shower as its
heat fades, over our meals silently, whenever our heads
are empty of other things, to keep ourselves company,
we pray. It is not a ritual for us, but a language.
It is not a cleansing, but a drowning:
not a garbage to be emptied, but a hollowness,
the shell of the world expanding inside us,
out to the inflamed implant, the pouch of fluid at our knees,
and no farther—

so that though we gladly would be dropped on the points
of our knees to the floor or though we would beg
to have boards smashed across them, breaking their helmets,
forever easing the gelatin pain from the last corner of the rattling cage,
cleaning the choice, freeing us for the maelstrom of the flesh
or the whole ballooning sanctorum of praise— we remain plain women,
overweight women, believing women, tied blood to seed into generations,
gripped by invisible deformity, the rheumatism keeping us human,
conformed to the infinite bubble of prayer, keeping us strange.


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