Happy Spring! This month offers us daffodils, cherry blossoms and best of all, my birthday, I mean, National Poetry Month! I have chosen yet another stellar poet, Lauren Gordon who asks us in the following poem, what prayer feels right in your mouth?
Quality of Life
The baby wants a parable for a good life, one of top milk
and caramel, a garden with pumpkins to kneel by and confess
a daily admission of weakness, where a squash tendril traffics
the trellis under an orange patina of sunshine. I will tell her
how winter saturates so deeply that every new breath escapes
without feet, how half of every mother’s heart is a chrome shadow.
Dirt pilled with pink egg shells, star clustered loam and her hands
balling into the deep black of it, this earth like a dilating pupil.
Pain insists on being tended to, I will say in our garden of silence.
A skinny sorrow stays us in the sad sands until we detach our heads
in surrender and this is what we grow, how we lie, how we will
spend our lives finding a prayer that feels right in our mouths.
Lauren Gordon is the author of four chapbooks, “Meaningful Fingers” (Finishing Line Press, 2014), “Keen” (Horse Less Press, 2014), “Fiddle Is Flood” (Blood Pudding Press, 2015), and “Generalizations about Spines” (Yellow Flag Press, 2015). She has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net awards and her work has appeared in such journals as Sugar House Review, burntdistrict, MiPOesias, The Andirondack Review, The Collagist, and Coldfront Magazine. She is a Contributing Editor to Radius Lit and lives with her family outside of Milwaukee.
