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Ajanaé Dawkins

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The prayer closet is where I beg—belly slung to shag carpet. Lightless sea-dark until another eye opens. (Until maturity, your prayers are instructions from seasoned saints. The church’s fixation on generational curses should be studied). Faith is genetic. So too, trauma. I am my mother’s prayers and the injuries1 that led her to altar2. Something we share besides our small teeth is praying to a living God about dead men3 who thieve; 

                                                                                Lord vengeance is yours          so steal me          back from their claws.                

                                                                                              Return me          to me              so I can stop replaying the time

                                                                                I said no.                I said               sure.                            I said                 nothing.

                                                                                I left      the door             unlocked.                                            I left.

                                                                                I tied a rope around my hands.           Bit an apple.                              Laid

                                                                                             at their feet.      Face                       to carpet.                      Oh,                   I know

                                                                                this position.               I know what I smell like                                       to a dead man 

                                                                                who can manipulate a corpse. 

                                                                                             God, 

                                                                               what did my mother say to you when they took her?

                                                                                                                                                          So I know to pray for something else. 

  1.  Visible or invisible. a. What the first husband caused when liquor turned his coward to ghost and eye to plum bruise. b. What the second husband caused with his costume of fidelity shorn off on Christmas Eve. c. What my father caused; his free and stagnant body while she grew me.
  2. Location: church house, closet, bathroom floor, sister-girlfriend's lap, new man’s cologned neck, table of collard greens, bible stuffed with obituaries.
  3. We skip their names when reporting the lineage. We left them and breathing or not, they dead. Their eyes surveil us from our babies' faces. All manner of mothering is complicated. Disrespectfully, we born looking just like our daddies. We grow into our mother’s habits.

Ajanaé Dawkins is a poet, conceptual artist and theologian. Her work has appeared in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, and more. Her chapbook, BLOOD-FLEX, won the New Delta Review’s chapbook prize and was released in Spring 2025. Ajanaé co-hosts the VS Podcast at the Poetry Foundation.