Work of the Unknown Petitioner

Where my words burrow soft 
I do not know, yet watch the sky fold velvet, 

tend to the blue,
spatter liberation to the drought-stricken 

fields. You know me, though you’ve never 
witnessed me. I blow the whiskery globe

of dandelion, it’s my prayer
hinging the light, just beyond the corner of your

nightstand, of your drainpipe,
my prayer a thing so prosaic, immaterial—yet 

see the heart wrecked, hard 
intractable crust over a hidden sea of tenderness, 

gold at the core—let me enter, unknown. Let me 
be the sigh, the shelter, unobserved. 

Let this slender nothing, these wisps floating upward
hammer and hew a home.

Laura Reece Hogan is the author of Butterfly Nebula (Backwaters, University of Nebraska Press), Litany of Flights (Paraclete Press), the chapbook O Garden-Dweller (Finishing Line), and the nonfiction book I Live, No Longer I (Wipf & Stock).

Art by Kristin Carver.