rich blues, image by SinnesReich, on Pixabay
Prayer When I Remember Trying to Crash My Car 25 Years Ago
That was me, driving a midnight blue Buick Regal, purring like a puck
over ice in the middle of Pennsylvania. Mourning. Stumbling.
There I was, slurring vodka over rocks, singing my glory days
at age 23. Since I wasn’t serving the Lord, I steered hard into a road
bank. I lived, though, for years it didn’t feel like living. My father,
who complains the veterans’ cemetery will be full before he dies,
patched the busted-up grille and headlights as if fixing me. But Lord,
broken souls don’t repair so easily—how one day you want to put
yourself in the grave & the next, you’re ready to be a holy blaze
in the world & then dig back into the tomb. That was me strutting
in a creased leather jacket, greased with oil & unsayable pain. Ducking
into dive bars & fireball shots that burned all the fear of God out.
That was me, sliding into the confessional with a banger headache.
Bless me, Father, full of shame and the knowledge I’d fall again.
Some sins hang on me like smoke, choking me even with the windows
down. But now the night road opens & I drive an old Trans Am past
American flag after flag winging from utility poles along horse farms.
Half-praying, half-running to the soldiers’ cemetery among the luminaries
& crickets. The difference is the pain I ran from sits in the front seat,
crying like my preemie son. In the cemetery, in the Trans Am,
I climb into my arms & howl to you, Lord. You in the hymning moon,
You in the eagle that lands between headstones. Meanwhile, a few
miles away, my father watches a football game, shaking his fist at the TV.
Alone, a dark bird rustles in a 1950 rusted-out Chevy pickup truck
outside the boneyard. Alone, in the dark’s heart. Alone, dark-hearted,
Lord, I don’t want my father to know how much it still almost pulls
me under. Despite giving up drinking, I don’t pray enough. These nights,
I try again: Lord, make me like a child. Undo my knots. Carry me
into a sweet sleep.
*
Prayer on the December Solstice
Under the aspen swags & incensed air, I ask, “God,
why are we so broken? Brokenhearted?”
A quivering bird’s mass of feathers on the edge
of flight—one phantom claw perched in my past
candlelit by the hurt I caused. An aura I can’t
stop showing, despite getting sober, asking forgiveness & You
washing me in mercy. A honey salve that should make
me whole, but mercy heals slowly in winter’s thaw,
exposing each fall before it scars. My
chest’s open wound glistens in winter light.
I focus on the tens of poinsettias flanking the altar,
velvety feather-petals in deep red foreshadowing Christ’s
blood, the Son of God who came not for a kingdom,
but for a cross. The priest says from the pulpit,
“He would have come to save just you.”
My mother creaks the kneeler in the pew behind.
God, why can’t I accept the way I’m broken
as the real life You’ve given,
a spring jumping from stones
doing the only thing it can?
I don’t turn my head toward the window,
wanting to imagine Heaven—a gleam in the dark—
is just beyond. But maybe the weight of wanting to be
whole isn’t the chase You want, God.
The homemade cross on the roadside outside
where a man walking got hit:
We’re still playing your song.
A 2017 New Jersey Council on the Arts poetry fellow, Nicole Rollender
is the author of the poetry collections Louder Than Everything You Love
and The Luster of Everything I'm Already Forgetting. Her work appears
in Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, Puerto del Sol,
Salt Hill Journal, and West Branch. She earned her MFA in creative writing
from The Pennsylvania State University.
February 2025 issue
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