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A Prayer
John Milkereit

It seems to me that my parents saved a prayer,

pressing dreams for me flat as goldenrods in a book,

hoping they weren’t bringing up extraterrestrials,

me as first example, followed by my brothers,

hovering over our experiments, one a gerbil who escaped

inside the planet of a radiator, another a rock tumbler

polishing stones to practice our first steps

before we rovered the moon. We trained in the basement

in the eclipse of their watchings, our bodies orbiting

the ping-pong table, astronauts unaware we were

approaching a six-pointed, violet star,

the celestial lily, parents turned to pale blue dots.

—
John Milkereit lives in Houston, Texas working as a mechanical engineer and has completed a M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the Rainier Writing Workshop. HIs work has appeared in various literary journals including The Ekphrastic Review, Panoply, Naugatuck River Review, and San Pedro River Review. In December 2023, Kelsay Books published his most recent collection of poems, Lost Sonnets for My Unvaccinated Lover.

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