Prayer in Case Your Lethal Injection Goes Awry

          Feels like vomiting bits of cloud, I’d say,
my rain scraped from a cement wall, this slow horizon
          of years in a dark cell nearing. Appeals
and appeals and appeals, to everybody and everything:
          iron bars, god, other people’s lawyers,
the imaginary stars, to death for what shape I can expect.
          But, you ask, why should anyone care?
Listen: I knew a plumber who fell between the car
          and platform, “in the gap,” as New Yorkers say,
right when the F train threw sparks and squealed
          into the station; it twisted him closed
like a bag of sliced bread, his waist and legs facing
          the wrong way. By some miracle, his paralysis
ceased before it reached his neck, so he remained awake
          until after they ushered his wife and kids down
to strain through a spree of solemn goodbyes. So
          this prayer is for grace: beneath the wheels
of excruciata, any memory might serve as a blessing. Once,
          the summer breathed me out like dried apricots,
seashells, while I lie on a blanket beside a dog and a being
          who cast into formless entirety and hauled up
love to pour over me, unruly and pure as a silver shoal
          onto the deck of a ship. I basked in something
besides sunlight that day. Lord, I don’t need to be
          the city, the cipher of its towers, nor
any concept really, a metaphor or simile, the abstraction
          of forgiveness, the heart versus its actual job,
which is to kill happily. Grant reversion, lord. An instant
          before they word by word erase the entire
collection of me except the trivia the body retains:
          eyelashes, nails, the gray scar on my thigh
from running with a pencil, the finally deflated lung like
          a nicotine-black windsock. I want merely
to exit with proof I contained more than what they think
          and never was I forced to tell them about it,
like I could’ve been some guy with a briefcase, just
          rushing off a subway, into the light overhead.

Prayer for the First-Time Passenger Watching an In-Flight Safety Demo

          Much is made of squinting into the middle distance,
through the fog or wavy heat or across the ballroom to find
          a soulmate. Yet the soul a livelong secret never chased,
bored as a child in a closet hours after a forgotten game
          of hide and seek. But be not reserved: what if we’re
breaking apart, what if we’re going down, if we’re already adrift
          and clinging to a waterlogged seatback beside the lord’s
squealing fuselage? How many of these unconscious nights,
          as the body’s mind dreamt its ridiculous fuff, did
the spirit fly off to meander heaven’s deserted coasts by itself,
          seafoam and driftwood and trailed by all the dogs
we’ve lost, their tails at last undocked? Lord, I’m admitting
          I’ve never been entirely convinced the soul was stored
inside us anyway. And so fumbling the tubes of oxygen and
          memory, leave us pray to arrive at that final destination,
the plane taxied to luminous, pearlescent gates and the greeter
          waving a cardstock sign was only us waiting to hold us
tighter than the lover we wish we’d always been. Or instead
          let us consider the angels instead, they who don’t possess
free will and therefore no soul and yet, enviably, never seem
          to actually fall. Not permanently. In fact, consider
that first angel, stretching its wings, fanning excitedly before
          the lord leaned over and, with an old shepherd’s crook,
nudged it into a jagged new kingdom, just over the edge.

Prayer for Those Suddenly Disassociated from a Relative with Alzheimer’s

          Hung in the walk-in cooler of god’s cloud-tiled laboratory,
you have to believe that the spare limbs and vestigia suddenly made sense
          in a certain ludicrous, Frankensteinian order, and therefore

mankind was stitched together on a rainy, lightning-festooned night
          in a flurry of giddy revelation. Okay—but who explained
to the leg that it couldn’t simply hop itself away? How sagged the appendix

          when it realized, among its purposeful friends, it was a mistake?
At the end of very busy days I sometimes remember I haven’t eaten
          and it occurs to me I may have been given a python’s digestive tract

by accident, or a camel’s spongy hump where the stomach should speak
          with that multidirectional tug of starvation that almost resembles
exhilaration; you don’t have to look far to find errors. Plus, that first brain,

          it was awarded the simple task of naming every human in
every language for the remainder of consciousness’s reign on Earth
          while at the same time convincing the blood there’s no reason

to envy the aqueous humor and also diverting each finger’s attention
          from its neighbor. Thus the invention of exhausted parenthood;
sometimes one forgets who’s in charge. Sometimes the words for daughter

          and son get confused with colors or a prominent feature:
Big-nose, Red-lips, Smile-I-can’t-quite-trust. Like us, our individual pieces
          can’t always recall who’s ill and healthy anymore as together

we trip the banks of purpose and burble downriver, singing nonsense
          to pass the time: oh this is the way we blow the soup and how we wait
how we wait for the spoon. Instead of health, instead of forgiveness, let us

          cede the question of why, like standing in the overgrown lawn
with no memory why we went outside. One cannot pray to be whole
          as such a prospect never existed to begin with, but allow us, lord,

to breathe detachment completely in, to cease the bickering about whom
          is of greatest import or which portion most holy and love instead
uncertainty, happy as today’s god absent a framework for tomorrow.

Colin Pope is the author of Why I Didn’t Go to Your Funeral (Tolsun Books, 2019). Poems, essays, and criticism have appeared in Slate, Third Coast, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, West Branch, Rattle, Willow Springs, Best New Poets, and others. Colin teaches at Midwestern State University and serves on the editorial board of Nimrod International. dancingbonez@yahoo.com