Mary Ann Honaker
Worship
This is your practice: kneeling in the bright warmth
from the windows with the holy words buzzing
over your lips. Pressing your forehead to the floor,
acknowledging that you are small, minute,
a speck of flesh on a speck of earth
whirling around a speck of fire, one among
millions, trillions, who knows? Yet you feel
the strings of brotherhood tying you, tugging you,
real as the strings you steady tomato plants with,
making sure they get their share of sun. These strings
are the same, ones that hold you to earth and lift you
beyond yourself at once, to a warmth outside
of your realm of perception yet real; an answer
stirs, rising out of your core, calming you,
nourishing you. You settle into a silence behind
the murmur of familiar voices. Then suddenly
a shout; you jolt from your trance, the cords tighten,
the cords loosen and dissolve into the air, the light
burns and wavers, your brothers fall, you fall
as if pushed by an unseen hand. Your hand
reaches for your brother’s hand. A voice you know
screams. You see your brother recede into his own eyes,
as if walking down a dark hallway, farther down,
farther still, until a black door shuts quietly behind him.
Mary Ann Honaker is the author of It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press in 2015). Her poems have appeared in 2 Bridges, Alyss, The Dudley Review, Euphony, Off the Coast, Topology, Van Gogh’s Ear, and The Lake, among other journals. Honaker holds a BA in philosophy from West Virginia University, an MTS from Harvard Divinity School, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. She lives in Beaver, West Virginia.
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