Prayer II

In college, when I wanted to pray, I walked
to the museum down the block. There was a room
there made entirely of beeswax. The room was small.
The walls were close. Any hand that touched them
left a mark. Once, I stood there until the museum closed.
Sometimes, in that room, I thought I could hear humming—
or the empty place where humming had been—I listened
and thought about the bees. How their small bodies bore
and mapped and made all that would be shaped into this room,
these walls a foot thick and thicker still with reverence
I wanted but could not feel then. I breathed in. The bees
had breathed. The museum had been a house before
it was a museum—the family who lived there collected art.
Walking around, you could tell which rooms had been
which. The history of Impressionism was reflected
in the dining room table, mahogany polished to still water.
The night guard told me the Rothko room had been
the cook’s—windowless, above the kitchen—and that
the room made of beeswax was once a linen closet.
I’m learning you can’t know what something was for
until its end, and often not even then. How many nights
had the cook turned over in her tired sheets? Sitting on the bed
to pour hot water in the basin where she soaked her feet,
had she leaned back to see the steam rise around her knees,
felt some rage unlock as she watched what water does with air?
Whatever Rothko’s paintings know, she knew first.
The house made into a museum—whatever prayer is,
whatever it can make of us, I want it to do that to me,
except that I want it to happen the other way around.

Sophia Stid is a poet from California. She is the Ecotone Postgraduate Fellow at UNC Wilmington, where she teaches creative writing and serves as an associate editor for Ecotone, the literary magazine dedicated to reimagining place. Recent work is published in Pleiades, Poetry Daily, and Best New Poets 2020.

Judge Willa Schneberg is a poet, essayist, visual artist, curator and psychotherapist in private practice. She authored five poetry collections including: Box Poems; In The Margins of The World, recipient of the Oregon Book Award; Storytelling in Cambodia, (CALYX Books); and Rending the Garment. Willa read at the Library of Congress, was a fellow at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Mudhouse Residency in Crete. Work has been published in numerous publications, including: American Poetry Review; Salmagundi, Poet Lore;Bellevue Literary Review, and CALYX, who published her essay “Where Guests Are Gods: A Poet’s Sojourn in Kathmandu” about her residency in Nepal.