Poetry

Dispellations: A Prayer

by Anna Maria Hong

Let dispersal reverse

pull the core of the core

in cinch the belly of the lord’s

curse pop it with a coiled



pin rehearse for worse

and worst release the burn

of bitumen release

the manikin boil



shepherd’s purse to voile

blanch belladonna to baste

the liver’s hoar turn

the sun’s dial



butter both sides

of foil feast on

the final course



Anna Maria Hong is the author of Age of Glass, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition, the novella H & G, winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Book Prize, and Fablesque, winner of Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, The Common, Plume, Ecotone, the Hopkins Review, Smartish Pace, Poetry Daily, The Best American Poetry, and other publications. She is an assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College.

FROM Volume 70, Number 2

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