Those prayers we used to say

That Sunday, I was sacrilegious,
eager as a sparrow to leave church,
peeked around the corners of strict rules,
a leaky washing machine, a cracked wooden rack
because we could not afford a dryer, the bleach
my mother said my brother tried to drink
when he was a toddler. Confident no one saw,

I ran to the side of a home caught in the entropy
of ritual, of expectations and lowbrow goals,
shutters on their final hinge, long since overdue for
painting. I knew what she’d say if she found me
under the cathedral bottom of the old blue spruce,
notebook and pencil symbiotic with my strange
urge to play Harriet the Spy, note everything 

and a preponderance of nothing around:
a neighbor at the roadside, retrieving mail
forgotten in the workweek. A limping woman
saving a child’s kickball that had wandered 
across the street. The quiet breath of a town
predisposed to resting on the Sabbath, 
implicating children told to do the same. And me, 

silent as a garden gnome, on my stomach 
in a layer of curt, dry needles, writing as if mission
meant capturing the pace of the world
on this sacred day exhausted by working-class poor,
they, praying for cash and easier lives, as I,
searching trees for righteous vocabulary, 
stayed outside starving for reconciliation.

Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt
 V1, September 7, 2026, Labor Day