ST. FRANCIS’S PRAYER Word that is forever Change, make me into a bone button on satin: Where there is a buckled over agoraphobe, lost on the wild-orange street, let me say to her, “Welcome home, friend,” and make it so. Where there is a scorched stretch of Martian valley floor, ash tree stumps sticking up like so many comb’s teeth, let me water the ground with tears of sweet sorghum syrup. Where there is a schizophrenic veteran hollering about Beelzebub living in his spleen, let me dab his forehead with damp coffee grounds. Where there is a corpse of an orphan mutt on the shoulder of I-65, let me carry it like a talisman and bury it in the pasture of an industrial farm, and fashion for it a headstone out of bald cyprus. Word that is forever Change, Grant that I may not so much seek to have my avocados and ramen noodles draped in an imperishable plastic shroud, as to drape someone’s avocados and ramen noodles in an imperishable plastic shroud. To have my neck rubbed with beeswax salve boiled over a gas stovetop, as to rub someone’s neck with beeswax salve boiled over a gas stovetop. To have a pack of Turkish Royals and a sack of boiled peanuts and a white-cherry Icee brought to me from the twilit five and dime, as to bring someone a pack of Turkish Royals and a sack of boiled peanuts and a white-cherry Icee from the twilit five and dime. “For it is giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is dying that we are born to eternal life.” Amen.
THE SERENITY PRAYER God, grant me the serenity to accept, with upraised palms, smooth like two nickels, the word that sometimes, like a loosed neuron, frenetically flits across a yellow field, whipping the wheat berries and their slender necks this way and that. The word that sometimes endures as obstinate matter, like the small outline of a nautilus that ties a hundred million years into a logarithmic knot between two igneous strata. The immutable word that, whether flitting or enduring, does so according to the irresistible whims of some genderfluid schoolteacher who is made to scrawl its preordained arithmetic on a blackboard behind a vermillion curtain. But, God, on that green June noon when the sun is a dried lemon wedge and the word (and its machete-shorn pathways), for a moment, only one, is pliable, its swirly lines and little hollow dots all malleable and soft on wet red stoneware, grant me the courage to be the potter’s birchwood rib for the word’s reworking. And, God, grant me the wisdom to know the difference between preordained arithmetic and wet red stoneware.
Photography Credit: Jason Rice
Will McCollum is from Birmingham, Alabama, and is a doctoral student in anthropological archaeology at the University of Chicago. He received his bachelor’s degree in anthropology and Islamic studies from Vanderbilt University in 2015. William’s poetry has been featured in The Gravity of the Thing and Sobotka Literary Magazine.