[Prayer for Those Bored by Perpetual Travesty]

A poem

    At a certain point, nothing is you.
You’re not the student when the shooter bursts in
    nor the mother with a bomb sewn

into her womb, nor the businessman bouncing
    in the malfunctioned plane. If you were,
you’d know it by now. Your soul

    would be pounding the metal walls as the ship
goes down, your screams would be caught
    in a wayward air pocket in the engine room.

But only you are you, sitting down to stare
    at the nightly news or check the scores
on your phone. You know how to stash yourself away,

    to fold up humanity and slide it under the couch,
into the overhead bin. We pray, of course,
    for less pain. But, oh, how we protect ourselves,

how my excess must trump your need. We pray
    to pray enough to secure our end, to reach up
and find the hooks and harness dangling. We pray

    the angels cry instead, whose mouths
never feed. Those angels never make a peep, so we pray
    to put them to use by heaping our weight atop

their radiant heads. Or maybe, just once, they might
    explain what it’s like to observe from on high
and cure us this incessant yearning to find out.

Colin Pope lives in Stillwater. His poetry has appeared in Slate, Willow Springs, Rattle, Poet Lore, Los Angeles Review, Linebreak, and Best New Poets, among other publications. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize and is a student at Oklahoma State University, where he serves on the editorial staff at Cimarron Review. He is at work on his first poetry collection.

Our poetry page is curated by Nimrod International Journal, The University of Tulsa’s literary magazine. For more information about Nimrod, visit utulsa.edu/nimrod.