Poem of the Week | December 01, 2025

“Abecedarian/Prayer” by Steve Gehrke is our Poem of the Week.

Steve Gehrke holds an MFA in poetry and screenwriting from the University of Texas-Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow, and a PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He has published four books, most recently Visitation (Main Street Rag, 2025). His other awards include a Pushcart Prize and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Individual poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies. He’s had scripts recognized by the Nicholls Foundation, Zoetrope, and the Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellowship.

Abecedarian/Prayer

All my life, I have kept a single person in my 

Brain—a family member, a friend, my daughter—a 

Carrousel of confidants, whisperees at whom I  

Direct my thoughts, and sometimes they  

Even talk back, though mostly they are just a- 

Float in my consciousness, a presence that 

Gives my caged voice, if not meaning, then the 

Heftiness of being heard, a validation of sorts.  

I don’t know if I could exist without them, could ever be 

Just me. It could be that my brain is a little off- 

Kilter, but I can’t think any other way and so must 

Live with my companions. Sometimes I wonder if 

Maybe there is a void in me, a lack of me- 

Ness, a missing self that is activated, is defined 

Only by the presence of another, which is why I am  

Perplexed that others can speak only to themselves, or to  

Quasi-versions of themselves. These ideas have 

Rotated through me for years. Then, one day, I  

Said to one of the nurses at dialysis, do you ever  

Talk to God? and she said, all day long, and this 

Upended me, like Blake’s tree of angels, so that now I  

View my inner others as masks for God, as a holiness 

Wrapped in the images I adore, their outer selves 

X-ed with treasure, so that I pray to the God in them, in 

You, loves, branches on the tree of me, my inner 

Zodiac, who make God real for me, and so, make me.  

Author’s Note

This poem is part of a sequence of abecedarian prayers I’ve been writing, though this one is less a prayer than a description of a kind of prayer. In general, I like the way the abecedarian form adds a bit of rigor to the impulse to pray, turns it into a more deliberate and focused practice.

The way of thinking described in this poem has been my default state of consciousness since at least my adolescence. As a child, God was a permanence in my head, but as I grew older, I began to lose my faith, and he was replaced by these rotating others.

A few years ago, a serious breakdown brought God back to me in a surprising and forceful way, and I started to think a lot about how others experienced God on a personal, internal level, which led me to the question I asked the nurse and her epiphany-provoking answer.