NaPoWriMo Day 16: Prayer for ____

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We are officially halfway through April! How has the month been treating you? Are you writing a lot? I hope these prompts are giving you some momentum. If you wrote any poems to these emails, I’d love to read them, too—reply back to this email, or forward to [email protected]. 🙂 

Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem” “Prayer for Containment” by Rochelle Hurt

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

Let’s do a free write for 7-8 minutes. Write about, or make a list, of things that have saved you. Try to focus on concrete items or actions, like your morning coffee, moving out of your hometown, ice cream sundaes, etc. 

Poem” “Prayer for Containment” by Rochelle Hurt

O my luscious muzzle, my savory switch,
my lamentful lasso, my steadfast fist-clench,
my deepest saddle, my most radial embrace,
my omnipresent invisible electric fence,
my sacred seatbelt, my staid straitjacket,
my salvation shackle, my steely soul brace,
my plaster body cast, my stiff tongue girdle,
my moral corset, my reinforced bootstrap,
my airtight Tupperware, my vacuum seal,
my sin-proof sippy cup, my locked joybox,
my padded prayer cell, my permanent womb,
my bolted confessional booth, your grace
is my dank crawl space, a tender lion’s jaw
where I startle and quiver, your eternal hiccup.

I adore Rochelle. She was my thesis advisor and is a brilliant poet, I have no shame in plugging her work, especially her collection The J-Girls, which absolutely thrilled me and made me think “I hope to write a book like that someday.”

This poem showcases how clever her mind is. It’s formal without being archaic, erotic while embracing the sacred, and constantly negotiating between restraint and submission, between safety and danger. I love how the images so often find comfort in words that are themselves discomforting: the speaker here claims holiness in both seatbelts and straitjackets, a juxtaposition that makes me pause and reconsider both objects.

The language of the poem also evolves, even if the poem largely carries the same cadence and sentence structure. I notice that the language slowly grows more metaphysical: “sacred” in line 5, “moral” in line 8, then “sin-proof” and “padded prayer” and “grace.” Most of the lines, also, have two different objects, but line 4 is just “my omnipresent invisible electric fence,” which is again an image that shouldn’t be comforting, but in this poem is.

Or, is it? There’s a way to read this poem where containment is a means for the speaker to feel safe, or there’s a more ironic interpretation, that these prayers are secretly insults, a rattling against the cage. It’s a bit of a Rorschach test, up to how the speaker engages with the poem, but whatever your inclination is, try re-reading the poem the opposite way, and see what stands out in the language.

Of course, the poem’s ending lines are dazzling, and only magnify the tension already mounting in this poem. “Tender lion’s jaw” is such a startling image, and “your eternal hiccup” is a surprising self-description, something small and intangible and almost embarrassing. On the surface, this poem reckons with constraint, but really it reckons with the speaker’s own humanity, how she navigates her own sense of self because of (or in spite of) constraint. In any case, it’s telling that constraint is her “own padded prayer cell” in a prayer for containment, as though containment itself is an argument for its own existence.

What makes this poem a prayer? What is the speaker asking for or reckoning with? Is the divinity here found, or generated, or mocked? Engage with these questions while you’re thinking about your own poem today.

Prompt

Write a prayer to something that has saved you. Use concrete imagery throughout. Let the progression of images themselves tell a story.