Jay Donald Smith
Prayer in Southeast Texas
for Tay Steed
Take the lockbox down. Tell the hospice
workers go, grab your keys and anodynes.
The soul departs. The machine stops
its awful
heaving sound. Make the anesthetic smell
permeate another life.
Now’s the time
to rifle through your things, empty bags
and salvage scraps for grace.
Try to make some prayer from purse contents─
O humid Texas night, spare
the tattered
kleenexes and bobby-pins we save
out of habit. Lord, have mercy on our things
that are divvied up and inherited as pain.
Say the work of night
remains everywhere,
like a hothouse light that can’t burn out.
O broken dime-store ring, hidden
amongst crumbs,
say you, too, are blind,
your empty socket prongs gripping the dark
mouth where your chiseled gem fell out─
say your only child, radiant, also left you.
Take the dust and place
a poultice there,
strange balm, the saintly spit and mud
of all beginnings. Open
to the air
your ash and see─your mourners, gathering
suffering’s ends, your many small bones─unclenched.
Jay Donald Smith is a poet and Master’s student in English Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. He is a graduate of the University of North Texas, former intern for the American Literary Review, and currently an Associate Poetry Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review. His creative work has been published in Poetry Salzburg and elsewhere.
Return to May 2014 Edition
for Tay Steed
Take the lockbox down. Tell the hospice
workers go, grab your keys and anodynes.
The soul departs. The machine stops
its awful
heaving sound. Make the anesthetic smell
permeate another life.
Now’s the time
to rifle through your things, empty bags
and salvage scraps for grace.
Try to make some prayer from purse contents─
O humid Texas night, spare
the tattered
kleenexes and bobby-pins we save
out of habit. Lord, have mercy on our things
that are divvied up and inherited as pain.
Say the work of night
remains everywhere,
like a hothouse light that can’t burn out.
O broken dime-store ring, hidden
amongst crumbs,
say you, too, are blind,
your empty socket prongs gripping the dark
mouth where your chiseled gem fell out─
say your only child, radiant, also left you.
Take the dust and place
a poultice there,
strange balm, the saintly spit and mud
of all beginnings. Open
to the air
your ash and see─your mourners, gathering
suffering’s ends, your many small bones─unclenched.
Jay Donald Smith is a poet and Master’s student in English Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. He is a graduate of the University of North Texas, former intern for the American Literary Review, and currently an Associate Poetry Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review. His creative work has been published in Poetry Salzburg and elsewhere.
Return to May 2014 Edition