Thrush Poetry Journal
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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.




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