Prayer for Healing Arrythmia

BY Karen An-Hwei Lee

Pray while waiting
at the airport

under a defibrillator
in glass adorned

with the image of a heart
gashed by white lightning

like saint iconography,
glass-sheathed

intercession
for cardio patients

whose hearts will fly
ahead of scheduled flights.

Yes, beaten gold
sinoatrial butterfly

piezoelectric
bird of fibrillation

quivers phrygian
and mixolydian,

the broken music
of tachycardia

cured in joules. Atrial flutter
is not always dangerous

yet all cardiac seas shiver
in the last minute of life.

 

Biography

KAREN AN-HWEI LEE is the author of Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008), In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award, and a chapbook, God’s One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe Press, 2002). The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, she currently chairs the English Department at a faith-based liberal arts college in southern California, where she is also a novice harpist.

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