A short prayer
There must be things to break.
There must be plates.
There must be jelly jars and hearts.
There must be bread.
There must be things to crack.
There must be eggs.
There must be wheat.
There must be knuckles and the mind.
There must be things to punch.
There must be walls of brick and walls of plaster,
clocks and bags and sparring partners.
There must be fucking fists.
There must be more.
There must be movement.
Let there be that as well.
Let there be that as well.
Let there be a full refrigerator,
with its freezer overflowing frozen goods.
Let there be a warm bed,
an occupied bed.
Let there be bodies
to slip into like so many pairs of stockings.
Let there be no runs.
Let there be
in each man’s hand
and every woman’s clutch
an open-dated one-way ticket out.
There must be that as well.
There must be.
by Drew Pisarra, previously published in Untitled & Other Poems
Twitter: @mistermysterio
Editor’s Note: After the punch of the first line, the repetition in this poem can lull the reader into complacency, but this prayer is more complicated than that, as the closing lines demonstrate.
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