Prayer
by Andrew
Hudgins
The preacher
had us get down on our knees
to pray,
our elbows propped on butt warmed seats.
A woman
to my left across the aisle
began to
hollar, Hep me, Jesus! Hep
me, Jesus!
And never having seen
a thing
like that before, I rose to look.
Without
a word, my mother drove her arm
into my
side. I doubled up and smacked
my head
against the pew. And though it hurt
I had enough
sense not to yell or cry.
Years later
in a backwoods Baptist church
I heard
a womanin great rolling sobs
cry, Hurt
me, Jesus! Hurt me, Jesus Lord!
and even
ig he didn't I am sure
that he
got credit for an unsanswered prayer.
And later
yet, through a gimcrack motel door,
I heard
a woman scream, Fuck
me, Jesus!
Fuck me, Jesus! IT
must have been a prayer.
* * *
My girlfriend
called last night at three a.m.
and woke
me. She was crying, could hardly talk.
She had
been raped when she was seventeen.
She had
to tell me. She understood if now
I had to
leave her. And all that I could say
was, No,
it doesn't bother me. A lie.
It sticks
like something putrid in my throat
that when
I put my hands on friends and say,
Be healed,
nobody yet has been healed. Still,
of all the
things I've given up to logic
this the
last one--prayer--the one I can't
let go,
for logic cannot understand
the virtues
of a viscious circle, why
a mother
suckles her contagious child,
or why the
vicitm has to be rebuked.
And logic
doesnn't stand a chance, a prayer.