Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Prayer
Let the transit of light right my wrongs:
Let the rock I threw at the other boy
Stay buried,
Let the canopy of continuous lies burn in brushfire,
Let the shoplifted hammer be returned to its hook.
*
Let the sliver of pheasant-bone stuck in my throat
Dissolve into water. Let the trickle
Slither over black rock into the Pacific:
Slide, crescendo, wave
Before generations of reeds.
*
Let the end begin in a distant city.
Let me be the last to know, so
I can see these tomatoes ripen, like a sentence
Completed, before I pick them.
Let them taste sweet as
Jason Labbe lives in Brooklyn, works for Simon & Schuster, and plays drums and percussion with various recording and performing projects around the Northeast. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Connecticut Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, AGNI, The Nebraska Review, Quarterly West, and Sycamore Review, among others.