John Owen

The Second Prayer

Saturdays he laid out fishing knives,

a polished row spreading the sweat rag

he pulled from his back pocket

and unfurled on the kitchen table.

I never knew why he sat so long

amid the musk of oil and steel,

cigarette smoke and stale laundry piles,

staring at the folded lines labor

scratched like a map into his brow.

The glare of nine bright blades sprayed

light in his eyes, though most days

we prayed for him not to come home.

Mother played Sinatra and waltzed

with the dog. She stacked books

by my bedside, singing Mood Indigo,

and promised that he promised

to never drink that stuff again.

Atop the refrigerator his revolver

lay on a phone book, and some nights

I would see him from wet windows,

wiping mud gray as gravestones off

the wool fedora the scarecrow wore,

tightening frayed twine that kept

pie tins tied to its lead pipe wrists.

I dreamed the stars turned to spiders.

I dreamed the well water laced

with moss and pine needles gave

way to Atlantis. Sometimes goat bleats

sounded like monks cloaked

and chanting by the mailbox line,

and while the smokestack towers

uncoiled in that distance of hills

and slack cables, he spoke to mother

of wetbacksand layoffs with another bottle’s

little harvest latched to his lip.

In the barn, unsold tobacco strips

stayed draped over rafters

like stalactites, the straw silvering

in the light of a low-hung moon

pouring through lumber slats.

Forgive him, Lord—that night

he tumbled into that ephemeral mirror

of heaven, hard enough to clatter

the door against cracked mud,

then with a crooked yellow rivulet,

broke the gauze of cobwebs stretched

over terra cotta pots and bushels.

Lord, you saw it all. He chucked crates

at the walls, and dusty seltzer

bottles shattered mosaics of hands

and twisted faces amid the hay.

He was angry, Lord. And tired.

Drake’s Creek

You stood naked by a mangled bridge rail,

above black water with a moon scattered

across its skin. You leapt, then twisted

your body through slivers of silver strewn

along the slow ripples, parts of you

vanishing and resurfacing like dolphin backs.

Fearing snakes and sharp rocks, the creek’s

invisible angers, I jumped from the bridge

because we were in love. And we tangled,

arms interlocked, tongue over tongue—

where one body ended, another began,

then pushing with our feet off the shore,

we floated apart until your fingers found

mine, but when twigs snapped on the bank,

we sank our heads, moving to shadows,

while a flashlight played over the water.

On Burning

The night mother thought I might die,

I lay splayed like a scarecrow in bed,

reddened with fever, dreaming shag carpet

grew mountains that melted onto sheets

sodden with sweat, while she hovered

over my body like a cold ghost, distanced

rooms from the husband, who sank

inside a dusty, corduroy chair,

dragging cigarettes down to slobbery filters.

Tight curls of steel blue smoke sailed

out a torn window screen, and he twisted

the cap off a cheap bottle of bourbon,

poured it crackling over ice packed tall

in a glass that no one bothered washing.

I remember the lamp and the Bible

opened to Exodus on the nightstand.

Winter’s gray breath glazed our house:

fog on the windowpanes, slush

clogging rainspouts, and the spigot leak

had iced over mid-drip, as if our lives

too stayed frozen in that moment,

somewhere between mother’s bent back,

her lips pressed to my forehead,

and the husband not yet knowing

father andlove meant worry and punishment.

No bills made late—she pawned the piano

to pay for my life, which came trickling

back, as if the plunge of a needle

sent a spritz that shrank the flames

inside each vein. When she packed me

back through the door, the husband’s

eyes went to white slits, a slurred growl

letting the mush of drool and Spam

he couldn’t swallow tumble to his shirt,

and if she took the chewed stub left

smoldering in the ashtray then snuffed

the ember between his eyebrows,

I do not blame her. To stamp out

one burning, she made another.