Riley Richards

The Importance of Failing

Your prayer should be, “Break the legs
of what I want to happen. Humiliate
my desire. Eat me like candy.
It’s spring and finally
I have no will.”
– Rumi

  1. Break the Legs of What I Want to Happen

As she drives us to our seafood lunch, my mother sobs over the latest death threat from my sister—this one taped to a shovel staked like a cross in her lily bed. She asks about the boundaries of tough love, tells me her fears of a wasted life, apologizes for the power shifting in my favor. And I’m ashamed to think in that moment of that tattoo I never got in college, the one that if I did, she’d threatened to disown me for Your good sake. Love, too, being a crown, or plank, or nail.

  1. Humiliate my Desire

Let me remind you about the time I dropped a dollar in the Orthodox offering box. I wanted to light a prayer candle for my friend’s breast cancer lump, but this lady snatched the candle from my hand, lit it herself, and planted it in the sand. Did Yevtushenko know that prayers could be stolen when he wrote, “I have no right to have faith in faith”? Did he think, like Rumi thought, that we were four birds each with one leg tied to the others? A flopping bouquet of birds!

  1. Eat Me like Candy

I’m already grieving all the lives I’ll never live. These three fingers of gin illuminate my entire house, and these blues tunes drown out the crepitations of my heart. Remembering the bony hand of my sexagenarian employee, Yvonne, around my wrist as she sipped my soda, and confessed like a sin the liver failure, heart disease, and Covid-19 of her long-term lover. She looked like a wet cat, draped in her t-shirt. Too tired to cry, she smiled, my body her cane.

  1. It’s Spring and Finally I Have No Will

I want you to pray to me so that you, too, can know my silence. I’m too hungry to bend for manna. Let my spirit intercede with the saints and angels for the shepherd who lost his sheep. Bless my rage and fear for it’s all I have between us. Forgive me, forgive me. Let your mercy unravel. Pay attention to me—crack open my jaw that I may bleat your name.

Riley Richards received an MFA in Poetry from Fairleigh-Dickinson University, taught Creative Writing and Political Writing at Uzhhorod National University in Uzhhorod, Ukraine, and is currently a PhD student at Florida State University. Riley’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in Fugue, After Happy Hour Review, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere.