Two Collects
Advent: A Collect
Break-in and battery two weeks before the season’s grand hallelujah: broken glass from a shattered window wreathed her body, found below in the tub. Did the pills let her creep there, as if searching for a manger, a word ringing with “safety”? Usually afraid—a grandfather’s multiple rapes—to shower or bathe alone, what else could have eased this blood-stained pilgrimage, ropes trailing around her wrists and ankles as though she were a half-opened gift? Lord, let me pluck a sole skein-like straw of understanding. Let the drugs that thrummed in her system have blackened the room and all sense so that she felt nothing in those pre-dawn Christmas hours. Saw no rising Eastern star through the jagged window pane or suffered Your cold breath on her frosted, bluing skin. Amen.
Divorce: A Collect
Lord, he called me a snake and our marriage invalid because performed by a bear and sexually predatory priest. Let me interrupt my prayer unto Thee: it wasn’t a bear, but a judge who loved safaris and taxidermied his chambers with trophies, one ursine. As for snakes, yes, I wear a diamond cloak and admire my own litheness of spine, coil and recoil through this world on my belly, feeling vibrations—like coming footsteps—and I rise to bite the heels which would tread on me. Why are the fangs that fill and glisten then pop, sharpened, through my mouth’s pink roof always ascribed to a male version of me? I may not be the apple of anyone’s eye—except Eve’s, hungry for girl-talk—but pumped venom should be prized if it brings souls closer to you. Or say the Word only, and I shall protect us from any further thudding of bodies and purge the world with Our venomous song. Amen.
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Diann Blakely is the author of Hurricane Walk (BOA Editions, 1992), named one of the year’s ten best poetry collections by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; Farewell, My Lovelies (Story Line, 2000), an Academy of American Poets Book Club’s special feature; and Cities of Flesh and the Dead, winner of the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award (1999) for a manuscript-in-progress and the 7th annual Elixir Book publication prize (2008). A two-timePushcart winner and former poetry editor at Antioch Review, she is currently at work on Rain in our Door: Duets with Robert Johnson and other poems.