More on: prayer

The absence of growth / a prayer I hold onto and it seems strange / to want something inside to die this much

a dream that repeated: to find the good / you must uproot the pain

May the curious prayer of work keep me / in contact with the stone / / and who knows what else.

do these monks with their straight lines / and right angles have the only franchise?

Sometimes it seems inane. A woman visiting my church one Sunday morning came up and told me she saw a picture of me in a beautiful yellow dress. That was it, the whole prophetic word. Me in a yellow dress.

Prayer is silence, / spirit-bones and soul-blood fluctuant as breath.

The night of my most pain
a new girl came and was put
in the opposite bed.

In our solemn conversations about the firemen, in our statements of unconditional loyalty and trust, I realize that maybe instead of the moral authority of God in our household, I have given Toby the firemen. Brave and noble, yes, but a shabby substitute for the Almighty.

As a queer woman raised Catholic, I have had a complex relationship to the church—making these photographs was part confession, part reconciliation.

All at once the stillness breaks
into a great applause of wings, the mounting up
in doxology, the downsweep then
of many heads in prayer.