Poem of the Week | March 25, 2024

“Prayer Meeting” by Michelle Bitting is our Poem of the Week.

Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. She is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist is forthcoming in 2024. Bitting is writing a hybrid novel about her great-grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.
 

Prayer Meeting

an ars poetica with a line by Terrance Hayes
 
I wanted to start with the orange light
and end with the lemon tree. The old
Ford was a lemon, and I wanted
the dashboard’s flashing emergency
to dénouement into a poet’s stately
haiku. Ripe fruit resting at the end
of a heavily winnowed branch. Looking
to be plucked or simply contemplated,
depending on if you are here to appreciate
miracles or slice them open, drizzle
honey and suck the dueling notes
of sweet & sour until you’re a fusion
of flavored smoke inside the beekeeper’s
billow. I have been that unafraid and I have
welcomed the inspection of my hives.
How often they make no sense while
admitting a chemical order. The poem
as life as moment propped on a stem
of green nutrients unveiling its sting.
Pieces of puzzle made into keys
for unlocking bones of the inscrutable
self. Or hole in the mirror. Which is reason to
search my glove compartment for
a manual to fix anything. So we can
get somewhere. Pages rifled that connect signs
& sounds with a feeling inside
like a psalm taking flight over the weeping fields
where blackbirds are sleeping. A poem
the bible or muse open to interpretation.
Scripture as invention that comes in handy say
my relatives from the cleave in the middle of
the country. A new view like a miracle they
say can happen. And I can agree
in the same way I know gods might appear
out of nowhere. Even this small flock
of neon green parrots flashing early along
winter skies. Boisterous & flamboyant
as emerald matadors shaking sequined
sleeves across an eternity of air. Or the wet
& trembling jewels of late November rain.
Ecstasy and a man surprising himself naked
& wild leaping from the tub where the gold
of unknowing is more precious than its
mineral value, with the weight of what’s
suppressed in the waiting. After your theatrical
set the audience erupting. How it was then
that the Volta made her dramatic essence known
inside a buzzing cacophony of praise & fluster.
Noise falling away like ready lemons from
a limb. Time stopping as when a haiku breathes
or spreads its momentary feathers. How
your face pivoted my direction inside
the adoring cloud like a bird or knife
in flight looking to land and my warning
lights flushed red. My comportments
opened. Instruction pages laying themselves
bare, holy as apparitions. In the end, it was
the beginning, and the good word was you
out of nowhere turning to ask, Is there somewhere
I’m supposed to be? And me not hesitating
to answer, Where is it you’d like to go?
 

Author’s Note

I was at a literary luncheon in Los Angeles, and after we finished eating, we made a circle. The leaders passed around notebooks with a haiku by Victoria Chang about a lemon tree as a prompt, to get our generative juices flowing. We took some minutes to reflect and scribble our thoughts in response. Someone mentioned the unexpected warning light of her engine that morning. As if on cue, two of us lobbed the old bane about cars and sour fruit. I gave myself the challenge of writing a piece that would begin with worry and end with calm, but with all sorts of epic shit in between. Of course, that’s not exactly what happened. I started the poem, and a few days later, after attending the Southern California Poetry Festival at Beyond Baroque, I was inspired in a new and unexpected way and proceeded to “finish” it.
 

Image credit: Alexis Rhone Fancher