Photograph by Amy Hart
[Our father] but not like the one still grieving his dead son, Wait. While ma’ dukes
prays the baseboards shake like they’re speaking in tongues, stomp their feet to the beats of
her sorrow.
[Who art in heaven] how much of our pain will you borrow before I can call it stolen?
How much will you steal before stealing is borrowing because ma’ dukes says things are
cyclical? When will this not be me investing in a future where I have no future where she
loosens her grip on my brother’s sheets, stands with carpet-burned knees, and praises a
god that answers?
[Hallowed be thy name] that sounds like gunshots when she screams it out in her dreams,
baseboards echo like hollow-point casings on the hardwood – hallowed and hollowed sound
the same when you cry em’ loud enough, hollow like a skull cavity like a home bled dry
of lifeblood like the slept-in sheets of my brother they still smell like arm & hammer like
his dying scent not the smell of him dying but the smell on his sheets that reminds her daily
that he has died. Is something only holy when it’s on a t-shirt or in a tomb?
[Thy kingdom come] slow and inevitable right at your goddamn face. Unlike eden less
like sodom and gomorrah and we enter it on a river wide like the jordan and more like the styx.
[Thy will be done] and not more than nothing will be done for our kingdom of sin, when our only sin is holding our sweat-beaded foreheads to the smog-sky.
[On earth as it is in heaven] for a week after his death the streets were silent, the plugs in their impalas muffle their mufflers rev their engines like a gentle finger on the trigger. Don’t worry the safety is still on. We are all repenting for what we don’t know, but we do know even in this silence god won’t hear us and maybe that’s for the best.
[Give us this day our daily bread] with finger-worn WIC cards that hold us in the stead of unsteady fathers and instead we settle for butter brown sugar and bread under the microwave light.
[And forgive our trespasses] like forgiveness is the cure for grief for anger that feels like the creak of the hammer on my pops’ glock.
[As we forgive those who trespass against us] When I point it at you who will forgive who?
[And lead us not into temptation] and as far from the want of a better life as possible,
[But deliver us from evil] in a boat with sheets like palm fronds and notes of arm & hammer,
on the only river leaving our kingdom away from grief and into nothing better.
Alexander Beets is a poet from Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. He has an M.A in Creative Writing at UNC Charlotte. His work explores the intersections and effects of the industrialism and classism that has grown and evolved in rural North Carolina and what that looks like for the people still living there.