Title of this poem is "Prayer Meeting."
I was a pious boy, growing up in a Roman Catholic household.
"Hankies and sheets, hopeless routine longing,
my mother and I, in the cellar twice each week,
her Sunbeam coasting under screws of steam,
me on my knees by the ironing board to call Hail Mary's.
Our bodies vapored into immaculate words.
Shirt tails talked back.
I wanted more than what I prayed for.
Her music-box antiphons mumbled us around the decades.
Neither of us knew why or what we implored.
God jerked alive in repetitions.
I reeled Him in.
She must have been appeasing me because she feared
offending Him, deity of hurt and rue,
of affliction and splintered rafters weeping wan work
dungarees, school uniforms, all together
in our separate voices.
The God of iron, unsatisfied, hissed back."