West Trade Review: "Oil-Rig Prayer" by D Anson Lee

D Anson Lee

Oil-Rig Prayer

Out on the Gulf the rig stands like a punctuation mark: sharp, necessary; steel legs sunk into a dark that has swallowed many alphabets. Your breakfast is a chipped mug; your goodbye a knot of diesel and rope. You climbed the ladder every dawn as if ascending a small volcano.

Lights string across the platform like rosary beads. At night the rig becomes a church for weathered men: hands rough as bark, voices smoothed by salt and repetition. You taught me the names of storms, the way the sea speaks in long consonants and then vanishes.

When the siren keens, we hold our breath the way sailors hold maps: tight, superstitious. You spoke of black gold like a man naming milk. We both knew the bones behind it. I pray for you with my phone pressed to your palm: static, the tiny ocean in a speaker. You say: I’ll be home tonight. The words cross that iron language and arrive.

I imagine the rig below the surface someday: an altar underwater, corals lit like candles around beams. For now, it coughs up light and men. You come home smelling of tar and grace. You kiss the kitchen’s lamplight, and the house fills with the sound of a small, blunt salvation.

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Image by Chinu from Pexels

D Anson Lee was born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and now lives in Texas. His background in philosophy, medical science, and ophthalmology informs much of his writing. His poems have appeared in Right Hand Pointing, Unbroken Journal, The Scarred Tree, Braided Way, Eunoia Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, Silver Birch Press, In Parentheses, The Orchards, Spillwords.com, Rat Bag Literary, 50-Word Story, Halfway Down the Stairs, Poetry Pea, Mouthful of Salt, and Larina’s Lit Lounge, among others.

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