The Objective Causality of Prayer & What I Miss From Sleep
by Pilar García
University of the Incarnate Word
Pilar García is an English major with a Creative Writing and a Finance minor at UIW. She is interested in becoming a book editor at a publishing house. She mostly enjoys reading contemporary literature, and her favorite author is Colleen Hoover.
The Objective Causality of Prayer
My mom bows her head beside me
and whispers her prayer with the strangers around us,
a familiar sissing that tickles my brain.
I never knew the words, and I never asked.
What’s the point? If we are here to honor
the dead, why not with petal showers that bathe
their corpses, and wash away the stench of misery
all around them. But no.
We just stand, hold hands,
share a prayer and dedicate it to all of them.
I don’t. I whisper on my own because why
should she get the same as everybody else?
I never met her,
but I seem to be the only one enlightened, prepared
to grant her due devotion and grace.
My mom says mamá only thought
of others. Droplets of sweat at her temples
dedicated to strangers that trampled her.
Drained her soul, clotted her veins, sucked out her spirit
through a plastic straw, and they killed her, ultimately.
Stopped the motion, the care, that helped her move ahead.
Reduced her to a bleeding brain drowned in what-could’ve-beens.
No one else deserves her prayer.
Because the day I left, to start over again, she came
to me and tamed the whomping currents
of my dream. She spoke to me, sang with me
a lullaby that lingers on my lips and soothes the sting
of not knowing her as someone real.
I never knew her voice, so maybe it wasn’t her at all.
But I can feel you mamá, and I just know.
So I owe this to you. This prayer
in name of what you should have become but could not.
What I Miss From Sleep
the thin buzz of the fan at night, lulls me to a daze with whisper
soft breeze that wriggles through the sheets, twists ‘round my toes, cools my skin
because despite the heat, I cannot sleep without cover from head to feet.
and remember then, back at home, the nights spent in my parents’ bed
as a cold drop of sweat would roll down my back, and the v crease between
my mom’s shut eyes would always show how defiant and detached she was
even while unconscious, never at rest. just like my dad’s flailing legs
while asleep, always leading him away from me. which they did, anyway.
and now I just miss what I thought I would never have to, in the first place.
I try to feel safe in the fuzz, the warmth of my too-thick, coarse sheets
in a room unknown to my memories, as I hug my pillow tight tight tight
because I still cannot believe I ever let go. though I did, and now I miss
the phony glow of the stars sprinkled across my childhood ceiling,
their green hue a beacon in the distance, one hundred thousand miles away
from me, yet the vines of pain still grip me and I regret ever leaving.