^{A prayer}

This winter I want a house
where women glide from god’s photographs:
their prewar radios and Eastern fields renounced
 
of stars and the memory of cows,
their lockets filled with a history of grass.
This winter I want a house
 
and in it, the clock ticks near the window, sound 
leaking like bad oil and watch how the curtain sops
the smell of the past. This winter I want a house

with a garden and one rose
like a lipsticked girl chewing a match.
This winter I want a house.
 
She brings in flowers waiting without
rain, dazzling at the root in a bath—
a metaphor of this winter house.
 
A green stem behind her ear in the past
where the women glide from god’s photographs.
This winter I want a house.
She is playing music when god is renounced.