PRAYERS FOR MATCHA POEMS by Jordan Mackey A project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY Ogden, Utah April 15, 2024 Approved _____________________________ Laura Stott ______________________________ Ryan Ridge ______________________________ Abraham Smith Mackey 1 Jordan Mackey Laura Stott MENG 6950 14 April 2024 He Shades His Leaves: A Critical Introduction to Prayers for Matcha For each spring’s tea harvest in Uji, Japan, Jintaro Yamamoto places rice-straw panels over his tea plants; a tradition that has become uncommon, explains a voiceover on the video of Jintaro carefully throwing straw over the panels (Romeo). While writing my ghazal for matcha (19), I thought about Jintaro and all the tea farmers who work diligently to produce the unique and spectacular drink. Tea farming in Japan and poetry writing in the United States might seem worlds apart, but they are connected as if particles entangled through the sheer force of discipline, devotion, knowledge of techniques, and the traditions of craft integral for a fine quality product. With the ghazal as an example, I chose to honor its tradition by keeping the interior rhymes consistent and unambiguous, and I used adverbs for those rhymes because of their flexibility to modify the heart of a ghazal which is its repeated phrase. I repeated the line, “he shades his leaves” (19) because this labor-intensive, often overlooked, and extremely important process in making ceremonial grade matcha is reflective of the hard work and dedication to craft required to write fine poetry. I wanted to begin my original work of the project with this ghazal because it sets the tone for the hard work it took not only to create the content of this thesis but for the difficult labor of love/hate I endured by confronting the demons that reared their ugly/beautiful heads in these poems as they expose and unfurl the struggles I have faced with a rigid religious upbringing and sometimes dubious coping skills for a slew of anxiety disorders. Within this thesis, matcha is Mackey 2 hard work, matcha is meditation, matcha is ceremony, matcha is received form, matcha is tradition, and matcha is a treatment for the many woes that have long ailed me. The project began with a meditation on one crippling leg of my lifelong journey with an unwanted traveling companion: the chemical imbalance that plays host to a brain-menagerie of anxiety disorders. A volatile mix of uprootedness and medication changes sent me into a particularly vicious anxiety spiral. I tried to channel my discomfort into poetry, which I figured would result in a brilliant combination of catharsis in art, but it was not working. The emotion and vocabulary were present, but I lacked a central focus that could shape the poems into a cohesive literary project. I knew what was most present in my mind: anxiety disorders and a longing for spiritual comfort in the absence of mental comfort. So, I knew where I wanted to go thematically for the subtext of the project, but I needed a catalyst that could function as a mode of transportation to get me there. While visiting my parents in California and attending the theologically conservative church where my father preaches, I was forced to reopen and confront the wounds of religious trauma which stood as a barrier to my longing for spiritual connection. This proved to be the catalyst I needed to start writing. With the religious theme in place, I had a well of images and a vocabulary from which to frame my poems and explore other topics and themes through image, narrative, lyric, and moments of essay, ranging from the rigid faith of my aging father to the apocryphal narratives of lesser apostles, all while placing expressions of anxiety and longing for spiritual comfort into the subtext of the poems where they make a more natural fit. This spiritual/religious theme eventually developed to the point that it manifested in a poetic form that would define the entire project: prayer. As soon as prayer as a form crossed my mind, I remembered The Wild Iris by Louise Glück and how she used matins and vespers as form Mackey 3 with repeating titles. Both matins and vespers are prayers or at least a liturgical tradition of morning and evening prayer ceremonies respectively. Glück used the aspects of morning and evening to highlight her meditation on seasons of change with the matins using the language of morning light: “Not the sun merely but the earth / itself shines, white fire” (Glück 31); and the vespers using the language of night: “…I live essentially / in darkness. You are perhaps training me to be / responsive to the slightest brightening” (Glück 43). While Glück used the prayers of matins and vespers to serve her theme beautifully, I have little personal connection to that kind of liturgy since I come from an evangelical tradition. We would never use the terms matins or vespers in the churches I grew up in; we would simply call them morning or evening prayers. So, I decided that prayer would be the word to define these poems. Once I established the principal form, I was able to create a seamless cohesion between each of the poems. This cohesive force allowed for greater nuance and variation from poem to poem. I was able to explore different elements of craft and style while keeping each poem connected, which meant prayer was foundational to each poem but was not restrictive. Outside of the word prayer appearing in each title and some sense of spiritual longing from the speaker of each poem, I did not employ any strict adherence to a formal concept of prayer. This freed me up to include different voices and personas, as well as the ability to explore other received forms and engage further with craft. I was therefore able to embrace both variation and meditation. For example, I worked with the idea of wanting to feel like a sitcom character in the one-off poem “Prayer for a Life of Television” (21) while also having a deep meditation through repeated images in various received forms focused on Japanese green tea in the poems with the title “Prayer for Matcha” (19, 22, 31-2, 36-8, 45, 48). Mackey 4 While establishing the overall theme of the project, I also dedicated serious effort to elements of craft. During the spring 2023 semester I made significant strides with poetic craft, particularly in regard to voice. James Tate helped me to lean into absurdity and humor; Frank O’Hara to feel confident with a conversational tone and sometimes frenetic pacing; and Lucille Clifton offered invaluable lessons on the power of brevity. At the height of my poetic hubris (spawned from the excitement of creating new work) I had the ridiculous thought that I finally knew how to write a “Jordan Mackey” poem, that I did not need to learn what that actually could mean because I already knew and all I required was space to write and ample fuel for inspiration. Thankfully, I snapped out of it. I realized that I was only beginning to understand both myself as a poet and the complex world of poetry around me. I redoubled my devotion to craft, and a moment of vindication arrived when I came across a recording of Diane Seuss’s book launch reading for Frank: Sonnets, where she said: Like a bead on a string, we’re always moving toward the next thing, and so whatever you think you are as a person, as a writer, you’re on your way to the next stop and not to get too hooked on any particular voice, strategy, or identity, so that when you’re doing what you’re doing, it’s fresh, it’s edgy, you’re nervous about it, and if it gets too comfortable, then it’s time to change it up (Seuss). With this idea in mind, I set out to identify the areas where I could improve my poetry from a craft standpoint. What I wanted to explore most were concepts of lyricism, sound, stylization, and received forms. One collection that stood out to me from my extensive reading list was Toxicon and Arachne by Joyelle McSweeney. What first struck me with the book was her use of sounds, wielded through a lexicon of volatile and grotesque vocabulary with a power to overshadow “… even Baudelaire in his crown of syphilis” (McSweeney 24). The poems in my Mackey 5 thesis project where I particularly tried to elevate sounds were “Prayer for a Cold Beer” (33), “Prayer for Ativan” (41), “Prayer for my Father’s Habitual TV Sins” (42), “A Prayer for a Cave When I Need it Most” (24), and “Prayer for Matcha” (45). I wanted my words to cut through the page with the guttural force of “…a thousand dirty thirsted gullets” (33) or to soften like a “…first last touch of velvet” (45). The obsessive discomfort of the great crescendo of my anxiety disorder culminated in a trip to an emergency room in California where I needed to dispel an internal rumor about the possibility of my imminent demise. Of course, I knew that I was not suffering a heart attack, but I also knew that if I was not assured of this via electrocardiogram, I would not be able to stop thinking about it. When one arrives at an ER with chest pain, they will receive an EKG quickly, and when that EKG is normal, they will just as promptly be sent back to the waiting room. I was aware of how much a trip to the ER would involve waiting, so I prepared myself with wireless headphones and a book of poetry—in this case, The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert. The conclusion of the ER visit was that I was having a rough transition from one selective serotonin uptake inhibitor to another and was reluctant to dip into my dwindling supply of benzodiazepines to help bridge the gap while I adjusted to the new medicine. The doctor gave me a prescription for enough clonazepam to get me through to my appointment with a psychiatrist, and while he had me there, administered a single dose of Ativan to calm me down. Around the time of this episode, I had been reading Frank: Sonnets and Toxicon and Arachne which includes a crown of “Toxic Sonnets” dedicated to John Keats (McSweeney 2742). I had something with fourteen lines in mind when I wrote my first “Prayer for Ativan” (20). I knew that Jack Gilbert would show up in the poems. He described himself as a “serious romantic” (Poetry Foundation), and I thought it quite romantic to frame this idea of me sitting Mackey 6 and reading his book in the ER lobby as the image of him literally sitting and waiting with me. This sentiment mirrors the idea of prayer in the sense that one might speak in prayer to the nonphysical idea of deity as if it were a physical presence with them. I also knew that I needed to make a reference to Gilbert’s poem “The Lord Sits with Me Out in Front” (Gilbert 50). The inclusion of this poem was not only useful in the fact that its own speaker sits with a presence that straddles the lines between otherworldly, ordinary, and imaginary, but also for the line, “We try to decide whether I am lonely,” which I included in my poem “Prayer for Ativan” (26). The inclusion of Jack Gilbert in these poems serves as the most direct reference I make to other poets in the project outside of my “Prayer to Frank O’Hara” (40) which opens up a theme of prayers to literary and historical figures I plan to explore further as I continue this project into a manuscript for a poetry collection. My thought on the importance of working in conversation with other poets is that it opens a door for readers to make connections between my work and the works with which they might already be familiar. It also serves as a great learning exercise. One of the ways I put this into practice was by finding direction from certain poets on how to work with contemporary examples of classical received forms. For this, I primarily looked to Frank: Sonnets by Diane Seuss, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes, Toxicon and Arachne by Joyelle McSweeney, and Witch Wife by Kiki Petrosino. I gave considerable thought to the idea of the American sonnet. I started with Terrance Hayes and the humor, heartbreak, history, and hysteria of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Hayes then led me to Wanda Coleman who gave definition to the sonetto americano with a hectic and brutally honest tour de force. I have high regards for Coleman and Hayes’ contribution to the form, but my primary focus for working with the sonnet in this project was with Diane Seuss and Frank: Sonnets. In his blurb for Frank, Hayes said, “Every poem… is Mackey 7 an example of the incomparable Seussian Sonnet, where elegy and narrative test the boundaries of the conventional form” (Hayes). Ross Gay called it a “…lyric memoir in sonnets” (Gay). I was drawn to the idea of narrative and memoir in the Seussian Sonnet model. I didn’t want to write the entire project in this form, but I wanted to work within the form for some of my more narrative driven ideas. I found a good fit for this style with my poems that were inspired by the apocryphal gospels. This is included in the project as “Bartholomew’s Prayer” (27) and “Judas’ Prayer” (49). In a sense, these texts are a sort of fantastical memoir attributed to New Testament characters who were outsiders. Judas is an outsider of course because of his betrayal, and Bartholomew is not even consistently named in the gospels. Both of the writings which were attributed to these disciples were not included in the biblical cannon and are often seen as heretical. The Seussian Sonnet provided a great template for distilling these ancient texts down to their core while adding my own embellishments which would serve as each sonnet’s volta. For instance, in “Bartholomew’s Prayer” (27), I chose to get caught in a semantic stumble which would intertwine the verb to drag with the noun drag as sexual expression in confrontation of a religious tradition that demonizes such sexual liberty. Moving on from the Seussian model, I also experimented with sonnets in other ways in “Prayer for an Uncouth Armageddon” (50), “Prayer for a More Reliable Guitar Strap” (29), and “Prayer for Ativan” (20, 26, 41). Inspired by McSweeney’s “Toxic Sonnets” (27-42), I attempted my own crown of sonnets, only to discover that this is extremely difficult. Around the same time, I began drinking matcha tea in the mornings out of both curiosity of its flavor and as part of a meditative practice to ease my anxiety. I was immediately hooked. I approached the matcha poems from the idea of drinking tea as ceremony, and ceremony as meditation. This lent itself well to my practice with received forms. I wanted images to recur across the poetic forms as a Mackey 8 reflection of the repetitions of meditation, ceremony, and ritual. I began with a Seussian modeled sonnet (31) with a hyper focus on the process and tools for making the tea, until a volta where it is dunk and the imagination of the speaker begins to wander. I then started writing the haikus (22, 32, 37-8, 48). While writing in an anglicized version of the Japanese form about a particularly Japanese way of drinking tea, I became insecure as to whether I was participating in cultural appreciation or appropriation. I decided to work through and resolve this anxious thought within the haikus themselves. I then began to explore other forms, writing a pantoum (36), ghazal (19), and sestina (45). The sestina was the biggest undertaking of these poems because of its size which needed a creative approach to minimize the repetitiveness of the form. In Kiki Petrosino’s “Political Poem” (Petrosino 41-2), she takes liberties with the form by ending some of the lines with prepositions or conjunctions which provides momentum for her enjambments. In McSweeney’s poems “Sestina Ayotzinapa” (59-60) and “Sestina Gratitude” (61-2) she sometimes replaces a repeating word with a rhyming word or synonym. Brain becomes drain and sigh becomes genocide while birds become flock. I decided to work with synonyms for my sestina. Green became verdant, envy’s hue, jade, emeralds, dollar bill, and finally grass stain. Similarly, cashmere became merino yarn, taffeta, seersucker shirt, velvet, burlap sack, and silky undergarments. I decided on the synonyms because the matcha poems were already repetitive since they are a meditation on a particular object. The synonyms allowed for the repeating words to keep the meditative focus of the poem going without becoming tiresome. In my research, I came across English translations of several haikus about tea from classical Japanese masters Bashō (MacMichael) and Issa (Lanoue). I have no linguistic training in Japanese, but I do have some experience with translating poems from French into English. Mackey 9 However, French has many linguistic similarities to English: both come from the Proto-IndoEuropean language family and English has strong Latinate influences from both Roman and French occupations of England. On the other hand, Japanese developed from an entirely different linguistic tradition. The original Bashō and Issa haikus were written mostly in kanji as one long line of logographic text which I wanted to include above the translation, but I did not have time to confirm the authenticity of my source for the kanji, especially for the haikus of Issa. I put the kanji characters and romaji text I found one at a time and in various combinations into Google Translate which resulted in a jumble of words in English. From these jumbled words, I constructed a poem which followed no strict guide to form other than a commitment to brevity and my own poetic voice, something I believe is more important to poetic translation as a form than linguistic integrity or the integrity of the original poetic form. In this way, I pay homage to work Robert Hass has done with haiku translation (Hass) and the idea of imitation rather than interpretation as demonstrated by Robert Lowell in his collection Imitations where his very loose translation of Baudelaire’s “To the Reader” (Lowell 46-7) remains for me the most captivating translation of that poem I have ever read. Before veering into received forms and translations, much of this project began as two long poems which were harvested for their individual parts and expanded or cut altogether. I started the two with a poem in sections called “The Real Value of Landscaping.” Each section functioned as its own poem with elements of religion and landscaping. I had considered from the beginning splitting up this poem and dispersing it throughout the collection. Breaking up the poems resulted in a loss of emphasis on the element of landscaping which allowed for a stronger focus on themes unique to each of the individual poems. For instance, “Prayer for my Father’s Middle Finger” (30), “Prayer for my Father’s Earbuds” (47), “Prayer for my Father’s Tree” (23), Mackey 10 and “Prayer for my Father’s Cup” (52) were all harvested from the original landscaping poem, and all of these poems focus closely on my strenuous relationship with my father as he confronts myriad of health issues. “Communion Prayer” (35), “The Elders’ Prayers” (25, 34, 46), and “Prayer for a Flower” (51) were also part of the landscaping poem. The second long poem was originally called “The Many Deaths and Resurrections of my Crisis of Faith.” I envisioned it as twelve sections of a poem in uneven couplets where the crisis of faith would be sometimes personified and fluctuate between an abstract concept, personal feeling, event, or substitute for a Christ-like figure. This poem is also where I drew inspiration from biblical and apocryphal narratives. “Judas’ Prayer” (49) was inspired by The Gospel of Judas (Kasser et al.) with a particular emphasis on confusion and compulsion. In the original narrative of The Gospel of Judas, Judas is given secret knowledge in spite of his betrayal of Jesus. This shows Judas as a character who is without control over his fate while Jesus is often laughing condescendingly at his disciples’ inability to understand the secret knowledge given to them. I initially began a section of the poem with an image of Lazarus resurrected before shifting to the betrayal of Judas, but once I started harvesting content from the original poem, I separated both Lazarus and Judas and made them the subject of their own poems. This resulted in significant revision to “Prayer for Lazarus” (39) which maintained the original couplets but included a new allusion to the overdose of my immediate cousin whom my siblings and I never knew existed until a text message about his death. His death had both an incredible closeness and yet expansive distance for me emotionally because he was both family and a complete stranger. I’m unsure if his death was intentional or accidental, but it can be safely assumed his life was difficult. The story of Lazarus is deeply moving because of the grief of his friends and family, and his resurrection feels triumphant in the story, but his narrative is never picked back up, and Mackey 11 readers of the New Testament are left knowing that Lazarus would eventually have to go through the experience of dying all over again. After separating the Judas poem from the Lazarus poem, I began to think of Frank: Sonnets. The Judas section was a length that worked well for conversion into a Seussian Sonnet, and I found the form fitting for a distilled narrative with a close focus on its images. The turn was also already in place where the image shifts from the ancient text to a contemporary setting with American silver coins in a Crown Royale pouch. I then applied the Seussian model to the poem about Bartholomew (27). I enjoyed the image of angels dragging a gigantic Satan forth from hell in chains of fire, and of him being so terrifying that Jesus’ disciples are literally scared to death at the sight of him, but I wanted the poem to say more. I thought about how apocryphal texts tend to be less reliably copied and preserved compared to the canonical texts of the Bible. This is especially true for the Gospel of Judas which is missing large chunks. Although copies of The Gospel of Bartholomew are better preserved, I chose in this sonnet to stumble with the word drag which I shuffled between tenses and its meaning from a simple verb to the idea of wearing drag or to be a drag queen. My intention is to provide a critique of the heteronormative dogma that dominates evangelical Christian belief in an attempt to reframe Bartholomew’s fearlessness to ask questions as being openminded or even questioning. Rather than framing Satan as the typical grotesque, animalistic figure, I described her as “breathtaking” (27) to emphasize her beauty. With a satirical voice and cheeky images such as “fabulous chains of fire” (27), I used humor to highlight the absurdity of Christian heteronormative hysteria. I portrayed the devil, like participants in drag, as unjustly oppressed; Jesus is something of a juvenile prankster; the apostles fearful and ignorant; and only Bartholomew is brave and progressive enough to ask questions, the content of which I have left for readers to infer, but I imply the idea of questioning Mackey 12 perhaps of his own sexual orientation or at least the unnecessary repression of the heteronormative dogma long associated with Christian doctrine. The most personal poems in the collection are perhaps the ones addressed to my father. I tried to keep a distance from the speaker who is based on myself and the father who is based on my own father. One way I achieved this was with the titles. The prayers were not for my father or to my father, but rather directed at some object or appendage my father possesses. Likewise, the poems themselves center on objects such as hedge trimmers, old ways (30), earbuds, or bad humor (47). These items, both concrete and abstract, act as “wedges” (47) to reinforce the more potent force of conflict between him and I: his misunderstandings and closedmindedness. I take the critique further with “Prayer for my Father’s Habitual TV Sins” (42) by highlighting conservative outrage over women’s reproductive rights championed on his nightly dose of Fox News while hypocrisy is made manifest in the complacency he guzzles over the death and suffering in Gaza. “Prayer for my Insecurities” (43) and “Prayer for a Flower” (51) are examples of poems where I wanted to experiment with brevity. This was inspired in many ways from the haikus about matcha and the translations of Basho and Issa (18, 44, 53). However, when I think of a poet who could display power in the pithy, I always think of Lucille Clifton. I originally envisioned “Prayer for a Flower” (51) as a piece of memoir about my grandmother playing with snapdragons with me in her front yard by the mailbox (something I am sure to still write about), but I wanted to get the idea of playfulness and the repression of playfulness with pious guilt across without distraction or explanation. I was inspired how Clifton achieves such a devastating loneliness in the loss of culture and language in her short poem: here yet be dragons Mackey 13 so many languages have fallen off of the edge of the world into the dragon’s mouth. some where there be monsters whose teeth are sharp and sparkle with lost people. lost poems. who among us can imagine ourselves unimagined? who among us can speak with so fragile tongue and remain proud? (Clifton 142) I drew inspiration from many poets in this project. The “matins” and “vespers” of Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris made me think about religious liturgy as a poetic form; Joyelle McSweeney made me reconsider the power of sounds; and along with Kiki Petrosino made me rethink received forms such as the sestina and the sonnet; which was reinvigorated for me through the sonnets of Diane Seuss, Wanda Coleman, and Terrance Hayes. Seuss acknowledged a mutual inspiration in her first sonnet from Frank when she says, “I’m a little like Frank O’Hara without the handsome / nose and penis and the New York School and Larry / Rivers” (Seuss 3). My admiration and imitation of Frank O’Hara runs deep. I thought since I was using prayers as a form, it would be a fun exercise to pray to a literary figure. My “Prayer to Frank O’Hara” (40) is homage to his chatty and humorous voice as well as to one of my favorite poems of all time: “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” (O’Hara 306-7). This thesis project is the culmination of years of hard work and study at Weber State University, as well as the dedication of the incredible faculty who have mentored me along the way. This project is far from complete, and my ultimate goal is to take momentum from this achievement and push myself to publish its contents and complete a manuscript for a book length collection of poetry. Mackey 14 Works Cited Clifton, Lucille. How to Carry Water. BOA, 2020 Gay, Ross. Cover Endorsement. Frank: Sonnets, by Diane Seuss, Graywolf Press, 2021 Gilbert, Jack. The Great Fires. Knopf, 2015 Glück, Louise. The Wild Iris. Ecco, 1992. Hass, Robert. The Essential Haiku. Ecco, 1994. Hayes, Terrance. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Penguin Poets, 2018 Hayes, Terrance. Cover Endorsement. Frank: Sonnets, by Diane Seuss, Graywolf Press, 2021 “Jack Gilbert.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jackgilbert. Accessed 10 Apr. 2024. Lanoue, David G. Haiku of Kobayashi Issa, haikuguy.com/issa/. Accessed 11 Apr. 2024. MacMichael, Ryan. “Tea Haiku.” T Ching, 25 Dec. 2012, tching.com/2012/12/teahaiku/#google_vignette. McSweeney, Joyelle. Toxicon and Arachne. Nightboat Books, 2020 Mackey 15 O’Hara, Frank. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen. University of California Press, 1995. Petrosino, Kiki. Witch Wife. Sarabande Books, 2022. Romeo, Claudia. “Why Ceremonial-Grade Matcha Is so Expensive.” Business Insider, Business Insider, www.businessinsider.com/why-ceremonial-grade-matcha-japan-so-expensive2022-8. Accessed 14 Apr. 2024. Seuss, Diane. Frank: Sonnets. Graywolf Press, 2021. Seuss, Diane. “Diane Seuss Presents: Frank: Sonnets: A Resplendent Life in Sonnets from the Author of Four-Legged Girl, a Finalist for The Pulitzer Prize.: By This Is a Bookstore & BookbugFacebook.” Facebook, www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=437182860937527. Accessed 10 Apr. 2024. Translated by M.R. James. The Gospel of Bartholomew, http://gnosis.org/library/gosbart.htm. Accessed 14. Apr. 2024. Translated by Rodolphe Kasser et al., The Gospel of Judas.Pdf, pinnaclelutheran.org/wpcontent/uploads/2018/11/Gospel-of-Judas.pdf. Accessed 10 Apr. 2024. Mackey 16 Prayers for Matcha Poems Jordan Mackey Mackey 17 Table of Contents Issa’s Prayer for Matcha 18 Prayer for Matcha (Ghazal) 19 Prayer for Ativan 20 Prayer for a Life of Television 21 Prayer for Matcha (Haiku) 22 Prayer for my Father’s Tree 23 A Prayer for a Cave When I Need it Most The Elders’ Prayer 25 Prayer for Ativan 26 Bartholomew’s Prayer 27 Prayer for Honesty 28 Prayer for a More Reliable Guitar Strap Prayer for my Father’s Middle Finger Prayer for Matcha (Sonnet) 31 Prayer for Matcha (Haiku) 32 Prayer for a Cold Beer 33 The Elder’s Prayer 34 Communion Prayer 35 Prayer for Matcha (Pantoum) 36 Prayer for Matcha (Haiku) 37 Prayer for Matcha (Haiku) 38 Prayer for Lazarus 39 Prayer to Frank O’Hara 40 Prayer for Ativan 41 Prayer for my Father’s Habitual TV Sins Prayer for my Insecurities 43 Bashō’s Prayer for Matcha 44 Prayer for Matcha (Sestina) 45 The Elders’ Prayer 46 Prayer for my Father’s Earbuds 47 Prayer for Matcha (Haiku) 48 Judas’ Prayer 49 Prayer for an Uncouth Armageddon 50 Prayer for a Flower 51 Prayer for my Father’s Cup 52 Issa’s Prayer for Matcha 53 24 29 30 42 Mackey 18 Issa’s Prayer for Matcha Translation of Kobayasha Issa (1763-1827) It was in the morning when I began to love tea and those mornings were cold. Mackey 19 Prayer for Matcha In Chiran, a farmer carefully shades his leaves. Pulling over the tarps, he tirelessly shades those leaves. Extracting bitterness from the sun herself, shaking a wary finger to the sky, playfully, he shades his leaves. He wakes early for the first day of harvest, splashes his face with tea, embracing the fragrance joyously, he shades his leaves. A pummeling tract of sencha in the mill—weighty as its stone, the farmer waits in anticipation—patiently, he shades his leaves. The final matriculation of an ancient art, powdered in my warm chawan, how can a thing taste so wonderfully… he shades his leaves. Mackey 20 Prayer for Ativan Consecrate my EKG, the jaded nurse his sacred tape, each twelve leads an apostle wrapped in holy light— cords to hymn thine praise. Electrocardiogram my fleet, send my buzzing feet back to the lobby to wait for rain to fall as gentle as faith in my headphones. Jack Gilbert sits with me. He yearns for Michiko. If you see them both, please, relay my thanks. Mackey 21 Prayer for a Life of Television Take a situation comedy and make it my life. I’d give anything to feel like the Brady Bunch. Dram-com, comedy of errors, commedia dell’arte… I don’t even have to be The Fresh Prince of any L.A. zip code or oil rich heirloom of some gawdy estate on a windy road. Sure, I’d love to be Ricky Ricardo, but I’m happy with Don Knots. Hell, you could make me Newman, for all I care, the faceless neighbor to Tim the Toolman Taylor. Just give me 10 good years, syndicate my life, let me rerun glory days for decades until I retire to Nick at Night, lullabying the elderly memoirs to gentle sleep as we ride together into the afterglow of eternity. Mackey 22 Prayer for Matcha Fill the matcha bowl, whisk until your wrist cries out— drink the frothy dream. ~ Earthen powder dust, what mysteries do you hold in your chemistry? ~ Antioxidants grasp the imagination in such healthful spell. Mackey 23 Prayer for my Father’s Tree If my father owned a home here, he’d plant a cypress tree. I tell him he’ll be dead before it’s tall, and he begins to cry tears of joy—he longs for the day he’s reunited with his Lord. Mackey 24 A Prayer for a Cave When I Need it Most Was it suffering on a freeway passing through Bakersfield slow burning the panicked tread southbound drifting lanes to droplets dripping from stalactites into deep reverberation breathe deviated septum breathe carbon dioxide chortle bat guano black mold carbon monoxide dissipate enough to see one beam of sunray one beam is all we need of one hi-beam flash hi-fi take me back to droplets of rain on the windshield dripping from meteorites into deep resuscitation. Mackey 25 The Elders’ Prayer When it rains, it floods the corner of the lawn, and in the water I see a submerged sprinkler head. If there’s a parable here, I’ve missed it—it’s lost on me. The elders of the church have gathered, they say, why build an irrigation system when God provides rain? I’m certain they can sense my skepticism because I hear them praying about it, but they won’t say anything to me. I want to tell them I’m in sore need of some good news, no more old news, but they’ve already gone to bed, and it’s raining again. Mackey 26 Prayer for Ativan Jack Gilbert sits with me, in the ER lobby where he won’t stop breaking my heart. That’s when we try to decide whether I am lonely. I think it goes without saying, Jack— though I’m not too sure he’s convinced. My mother is frustrated it’s taking so long. At some point they must call out my name as written down in the Book of Life, which is made from paper cut from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The hoops I have to jump through just to score some relief. Mackey 27 Bartholomew’s Prayer On the third day he rose again and with the dead on the rise many of us set in motion our apocalyptic emergency plans, written in the apocryphal margins of some lesser gospel of the least remembered disciple Bartholomew. Whose gospel was not well received but has some of the best action sequences: Satan in drag or was it dragged or were they angels drugged or drugging or dragging …that’s it! A gigantic Satan in drag drug forth from the depths of hell, wrapped in fabulous chains of fire so breathtaking that all twelve apostles dropped dead at the sight of her—awestruck to death by the monumental weight of their ancient homophobia— oh, but Jesus revived them right away—being well known for pulling such pranks. Of course, while all eleven of the other apostles cowered, it was Bartholomew who was unafraid to ask some questions. Mackey 28 Prayer for Honesty My crisis of faith was sentenced to death for blasphemy forced to carry its own means of execution: a very heavy, leatherbound NIV Bible, carted halfway across the country on a tour bus full of high school choir singers on their way to Florida ostensibly to sing songs of praise to their Lord, but in reality, all they truly wanted they would find at Disney World or at the beach in Daytona glistening in the suntan lotion of desire. Mackey 29 Prayer for a More Reliable Guitar Strap When Saul had a spirit of malcontent, his friends begged him to listen to some harp music, and who plays better than David— he knows all the chords. In my youth I tried to play through every chord in the chord-chart poster on my bedroom wall with my hefty Epiphone Les Paul, but the strap broke right as I strummed the C# maj7, and the guitar fell and broke my collarbone. I wanted so badly to look like Michelangelo’s David. Sling over my shoulder, gazing without fear toward the city of my enemies: Joplin, Missouri. Mackey 30 Prayer for my Father’s Middle Finger My father flipped me off and yelled through his teeth when he found out I believe in evolution. I thought about flipping the bird back, but he was already lost in thought, trying to trim back the hedge— a project he started years ago, electric hedge trimmers in his hands looking something like a zipper, tripping over the cord, his entire body tangled in electrical cables and wires— tendrils reaching through the darkness of the garage to pull him back into his old ways, manifesting the ancient devices he would never throw away: a VCR, fax machine, car phone— it all feels a little like MS-DOS green light, illuminating, the theology degree hanging on his office wall right next to a picture of me. Mackey 31 Prayer for Matcha Take the blue chakin with embroidered cherry blossom branch, unfold it flat on the glass stovetop, and set the ceramic chawan and natsume next to it. Warm the bowl with hot water and then wipe it dry with the chakin. Scoop two chashaku of ceremonial grade matcha into the sieve and shake. Add enough hot water, and with the chasen, whisk vigorously with wrist back and forth for thirty seconds without letting the bamboo brush the bottom of the bowl. It will froth into a vibrant jade and smell of earth. Let the warm tea flood your whole mouth, its texture is velvet, it tastes without bitterness—notes of walnut and grapefruit. In three long sips the tea is gone—it leaves no leaves to read, but your immediate future will hold a steady, calming energy, a focus to look far enough ahead in time that you’ll come back around to see some Zen Buddhist monks, and you should wave. Mackey 32 Prayer for Matcha Sencha leaves in spring will grow under careful shade to become delight. ~ I feel like a thief, steeling the secret of dreams that are free to all. ~ Starbucks has matcha, westernized with corn syrup— the milk gives me gas. Mackey 33 Prayer for a Cold Beer When I first saw the burly miscreants smash tankards of frothing into clattering cartoon handed laughter, I thought O God how I want to know fun. I played pretend in the kitchen sink. Dawn suds pouring foam from the mouth of old Pfaltzgraff mugs, as if the drain were a thousand dirty thirsted gullets pleading for more, more turned on than blue and red neon lights— Bud Lite signs flickering their cold promise to white and red cans of Budweiser, shivering in the simmering summer heat, heavy with condensation on the hotdog bun of family reunion bottled thick on the cooler of a distant uncle’s breath enjoying himself immensely at rodeos, 4th of July firework shows, live music wafting over the cedar fence of Wilder’s patio— a mating call of harmonica caked in rapturous night sounds like avarice lingering in the coarse cannabis texture of a downtown parade where children fling hoops of soap into unbelievable bubbles in the Carthaginian courthouse lawn where no one is pounding their fist into the oak and everything tastes of a well-earned sunburn, salty in the earth where one might hear the brewing heartbeat of the sauna stones. Lawnmowers drone in the backyard of our daydreams, our yeast-dreams yearn for old Jim Bob’s Steakhouse— side salads with French dressing and blue cheese, cheap shoes crunching the floor peanuts deep into the grout, empty as a bison hanging on the dead prairie’s wood planked walls, taxidermized into a bitter first sip. Mackey 34 The Elders’ Prayer The elders have returned another atmospheric river bends the horizon, pedals of tree blossoms fall like snow and no one will pinch me into nocturnal panic. The elders lean in close, snatch my crystals, smack the ceremonial matcha from my hands. I tell them, I don’t need these things, but I want them. The oldest of them whispers so close to my ear I can hear his gingivitis. It says, do you want to know the real secret? I nod. It laughs, Those sprinklers haven’t worked for years. Mackey 35 Communion Prayer If I lived in the Central Valley or the Valley of the Sun, I’d maybe grow oranges, but I’d for sure plant a lime tree and call it my margarita tree. As far as communion goes, I think tequila will pass for wine, and tortillas— tortillas are surely an unleavened bread. Mackey 36 Prayer for Matcha Holy is your morning tea. Blessed by the fountain of our dreams. In some past, I sing in Japanese, the leaves mean everything. Blessed is the fountain of our dreams— though we whisk our lives away, leaving behind the meaning of everything within our bowl of grace. While we whisk our silly lives away, the monk sips his tea in peace— entranced in his bowl of grace, confident it will all be fine. The monk his tea in quiet morning. Someone somewhere sings in Japanese. I’m sure it will all turn out fine. Holy is your morning tea. Mackey 37 Prayer for Matcha I’m not Japanese, though some of my family are— is tea thick as blood? ~ Not tea nor coffee are grown in the land of my ancient ancestry. ~ I much prefer tea— black, white, green, oolong, rooibos— we could learn from it. Mackey 38 Prayer for Matcha Stop trying to save the world—listen—it tells you, just drink your damn tea. ~ Think about it as fine wine from a fine vineyard— its taste as complex. ~ It tastes of the earth, notes of walnut and grapefruit, texture is velvet. Mackey 39 Prayer for Lazarus As sudden as a flash of lightning my crisis of faith returned reinvigorated like Lazarus high on amphetamines bursting free of his graveclothes shook in his chakras unsure how to handle the weight of second chances he swallows rosary beads, injects colloidal silver into the same fatal vein as my first cousin dead in the Toyota—the first time we ever heard his name, and that’s when the sick thought creeps out from under the cupboard Oh Lazarus, what kind of a life did you come back to? Mackey 40 Prayer to Frank O’Hara Oh Frank, you really are my star sign. If you could mediate a meeting between me and the sun, that’d sure be great. And I feel like I really can hear him calling out, a bit annoyed, from the great beyond, You might want to do something about those thick curtains first. Mackey 41 Prayer for Ativan Tightness Tightening tight knots in my chest neck shoulder back collarbone carotid collared vest left arm lingering dream in seated sweat seated sweet voracious taste of oxygen of heap of heave of heat of helluva hallucinated mane nape converged coalesced hell-of-a shame a goodbye brain gon’ deteriorate this mail it in mail it back a buyers’ regret agitated head lice aggregated suffering suffocating succotash suffice it to say naysayers deplete degeneration to repatriate my scuffle muffle muzzle maw Ma Mom Mommy! Wait! Haw ha hee-haw he hop hot hip-hop huzzah humiliate few whew fool wool fumigate fungi an eye annihilate just two more lines two more times two by two tell Noah no crocodiles next to the mountain lions. Mackey 42 Prayer for my Father’s Habitual TV Sins Every night my father poisons himself via the CPAP machine of toxic television, attached to his ear by volatile headphones. A steady air pressure of misinformation keeps him from relaxing his throat chakra into something as sinister as one critical thought. While another wokish conspiracy threatens to dethrone the 44oz. Christian God of soda, the manual vacuum aspiration of his one and only unbegotten and unborn son, stillborn of the virgin birther theory, unwilling to pony up the supporting documentation, a strict refusal to pull wool over his eyes glued hard to the cashmere boob tube of informational warfare, unblinked by another explosively induced abortion in Gaza, the Christ-head faltering to find any hope near his hometown, now failing to see the point of his great sacrifice, his most ardent followers conjuring chaos at the temple, overturning defamation judgments in a mind that loves bombs more than babies, we would never shake a bomb, Herod was well within his regal right to slaughter the babes of Bethlehem, and Bethlehem is only about 60 miles away from Gaza where hellfire rains from the same red-stained hands that point their red-stained finger in my direction, yelling from red-stained lips that he is not the one who drinks of the Kool-Aid, oblivious to his reference to a self-inflicted massacre, unaware of the obvious sanguine nature of all of these unnecessary stains. Mackey 43 Prayer for my Insecurities If you were a song, you’d be something great. If you were a poem, you would be ok. Mackey 44 Bashō’s Prayer for Matcha Translation of Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) The monk sips his morning tea, silent as a flower. Mackey 45 Prayer for Matcha My father has become suspicious of the powder; I think this is because of its vibrant color—green. I have made a promise not to snort it or smoke it while sifting its vegetal fragrance like a panner’s gravel, manifesting some precious thing to turn up in the suds, such residue of matcha on my fingertips, soft as cashmere. A waterspout unfurls from the gooseneck spigot like merino yarn splashing the sides of the warm bowl, embossed in dust until it sinks into the succumbing gasp of a drowning mousse. I circle the whisk around the bottom of the verdant habitat, now bursting to life within the exquisite loam, dissolving each clump into its softly scalding steam. My brain starts to salivate, condensate on a heavy fog. I envision evening gowns in wonderful tabulations of taffeta, singing into the swing of sighs, heavy as the whole earth, christening my excitations into a heart chambered mill, pumping the coming calm into a meditation on envy’s hue. Come now, it’s time to whisk the soup into a lovely froth. Beat the potion like a fiend, unfearful of the forming foam. Do not let the bamboo brush the bottom of the cumulus cloud, wafting its hot atmospheric pressure into a hurricane of jade, a meteorological appetite, gawking in a seersucker shirt. Chemistry this good could never come from a line of coke, sniffed out of the imagination of tea farmers, hands in the dirt, chauffeuring our lips to usucha or to koicha: the savory cud. Swish in its warmth, nose of its floral, mouthfeel the bubbling air. My tongue is a constellation, and my universe is just one grain. The particles collide, entangle sweetness with astringence in the mist. The third and final sip will be your last first touch of velvet. Everything else is now polyethylene pretending to be emeralds. I’d give anything to stay and sip it down to the last dollar bill, I’ll sell myself to any monastic tradition, practice Tai Chi on the lawn, chant chai tea in long pantoums and ghazals by my burlap sack at night, brew Trappist ales into the wee hours of the effervescence, play nocturnes on the pipe organs of my catatonic fumes, because if this opportunity passes, I will be finely crushed, forced to cold brew the grass stain of disappointment into a fizzy breath within the chlorophyl taste of a low-lying ozone layer chaffed raw by the silky undergarments of a bitter chalk. Mackey 46 The Elders’ Prayer Most of the elders have died in their sleep from carbon monoxide poisoning of the internal combustion of their unshakeable faith. Those who remain wear MAGA hats and complain how gout keeps them from enjoying the rain. They tow pristine fishing boats with immeasurable Dodge Rams through orange orchards and migrant workers. I do not ask them for advice, but they give it anyway. I am ungrateful, they think, for the many treasures withheld from me. I want to tell them to go fuck themselves, but they’ve already succumbed to their own noxious fumes. Mackey 47 Prayer for my Father’s Earbuds My father is so old he cannot stop changing because he’s too settled in his ways to change now. He’s come to tell me he’s moving soon, but he’s glad I’m here. I ask him where he’s moving to, but he’s already plunged his earbuds deep into the ear canal—as loud a wedge grown between us, cemented in the earwax and viscous fibers of his misunderstandings. I ask again, louder this time, but he cannot hear me, he’s laughing absurdly at some joke I’m sure was never all that funny to begin with. Mackey 48 Prayer for Matcha Don’t run away now, it will only taste better if you give it time. ~ It brings me a peace I hold in ceremony for a good feeling. ~ Just drink the damned tea, partake in something great, and be happy you know. Mackey 49 Judas’ Prayer Disoriented and confused as Judas Iscariot sobbing at the sky in obedience to the luminous cloud Adamas; Jesus’s condescending laugh in his ear; the luminous cloud self-generates multitudes of A.I.s or angels or æons of angels, self-propagating, out of control, proclaiming— here they are, Judas: the keys to all the mysteries you could ever want to know. Yet when they come for your Lord, you will say, “he’s right over here,” then hurry to collect your payment before they pass The Coinage Act of 1965; at what point will you keep your coins in the purple pouch that covers the bottle of a certain brand of Canadian whiskey, on sale if you buy the one flavored by the fruit of the tree from which you hang. Mackey 50 Prayer for an Uncouth Armageddon The trumpets blast and all four horsemen arrive like drug dealers in a Charger, Mustang, Bronco, and 1988 Dodge Colt. My crisis of faith descends from on high, distributing psychedelics to all creation. There is ketamine in the communion wafers; lysergic acid in the Eucharist; the high priest burns incense of DMT; John the Baptist loses his head on molly and wild shrooms; my crisis of faith takes two peyote cactuses, five loaves of marijuana bread, and feeds the multitudes. Jeff Buckley sings the lost verses of “Hallelujah;” King David supplements with those secret chords; Leonard Cohen looks on approvingly from the penthouse suite of his Tower of Song where Bob Dylan pats me on the shoulder as a reminder that Everybody Must Get Stoned. Mackey 51 Prayer for a Flower Forgive me for having fun for I knew not what I’d done; as penitence I will plant snapdragons in the planter by the front door, but I will not snap them and by no means use them as dragon puppets. Mackey 52 Prayer for my Father’s Cup My father walks by cradling a 44oz. Styrofoam cup of Diet Coke. I tell him he should cut back, but he just coughs up a piece of his congested heart. He tells me he’s falling to pieces, and I believe him. He pulls out his groin just rolling over in bed. I tell him, that’s the bed you made. Then he shows me the bruises running up and down his wobbly leg, foot swollen like a sponge of his calf skin stretched tight as a leather clutch in bright cellulitis red. I tell him to get some rest, and he yawns me a song. A beautiful song about cheeseburgers. Mackey 53 Issa’s Prayer for Matcha Translation of Kobayasha Issa (1763-1827) The water I use for my tea comes from a babbling brook of fireflies.