Rochelle Hurt

PRAYER FOR CONTAINMENT

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.

ROCHELLE HURT is the author of two poetry collections: In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street), which won the Barrow Street Book Prize, and The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems (White Pine). Recent poems and essays have appeared in  Hayden's Ferry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, and Prairie Schooner. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida and runs the review site The Bind.