Three Poems
Victoria Bosch Murray
PRAYER TO PAIN
The doctor asks where it hurts.
With the tip of a borrowed pen you trace the absent rib,
that Biblical scar, tickle the edge
of the raised ridge, a vacant dune between
land and sea just below your left breast—
like asking where pleasure starts,
where whiskey settles, when you first knew
his hand in your heart.
PRAYER FOR STOLEN STUFF
The chain saw and the fly rod. The coveralls
from clean laundry left in back of the Ford
sutured with your name in pink above
the right pocket. A Platinum Master Card
during a transaction in front of your kids
and a security camera. (It’s how you got it back.)
The cost of a rebuilt engine. Your pension.
Your sound sleep. Your wife’s heart.
PRAYER TO FAITHFULNESS
When you drive downtown in search of him,
try to remember how he looks
in jeans; what he wore when last seen
(that mustard-stained sweatshirt?); what is missing
from his things; why he left his keys.
When you call the hospital, the morgue,
the cops—"I'm sorry, ma'am"—
you know he's gone, not where;
nor why he left.
Victoria Bosch Murray's poetry has appeared in American Poetry Journal, Field, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Inch, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook of poems, On the Hood of Someone Else’s Car, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2010. She is a contributing editor at Salamander and teaches writing and literature at Stonehill College near Boston, Massachusetts. She has an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College.