Edits-to-prayers.docx

We who see the girls as friends and ourselves as enemies. We born into sandpits silted with the legacy of stolen milk and forbidden storybooks, who pay the tax on our teachers’ salaried silence. Washcloth boys wrung of any last drop of self which catches the light, soaked in the idea of manhood spilled from the knuckles of our peers. Yet still they call us limp. Yet still with us they try to wipe the floor. Mother in thy mercy, hear our prayer

When they come for us at the bus stop in the changing rooms, the sermon keep the choir of our hands and loud. Keep the run of our mouths and the break of our sweat ready. Mother in thy mercy, hear our prayer.

Warn us of becoming our fathers who were taught to become their fathers who were taught to ration softness like dried fruit. Stash their shadows below floorboards. Who were taught to fight as if tears were the enemy. The same battle which fills the trenches between our inherited ribs. Mother in thy mercy, hear our prayer. Protect us along the troubled track pad Of dark screens. Remind us mrlollipop_69 is not really interested in our coursework. It’s 2am. Deliver us from typing our way into the backseat of a stranger’s body. Grinding our teeth into a webcam and filtering the fear from our gums. Let us not grow up mistaking pixels and no surnames for romance. Or humanity. Forgive us when we do. Mother in thy mercy, hear our prayer. Make us wary of falling at the altar of the man who smuggles chest hair and stolen decades beneath his shirt,

who sniffs our lack thereof and smells opportunity. Teach us danger does not always arrive with his knife in view. Sometimes he pays for dinner tells us we look young likes the taste. Mother in thy mercy, hear our prayer. When they come for us again outside the bar on the polling card from our own ranks, tell us we are not the bite marks, the dirt or scab. It is not for us to lift ourselves from the skin of this town. Tell us we have the same right to walk down its street to kiss its sky without the birds crows’ gossip without the wind gusting with the need to teach us a lesson to two. We have the same right to sleep in its grass Without the soil turning grave below us.. In the name of Jonathan, David and the brothers we have wept for. In the name of all the siblings we lost along the way whose cries were not listened to in time whose hands sung their own eulogy whose bodies crochet us better clouds to dream of.

Mother in thy mercy, hear our prayer.