Who Will Pray For Me Now?
Caitlin Johnson | Poetry, Summer 2025
for Annette Dorris Brand (1926-2015)
I am on the long highway
between this life and that,
beyond a glass-fed skyline,
beyond the Mason-Dixon,
a lonely little blue arrow
stuttering its way south again.
I touch the GPS. Tangible
motion, fast enough. In time.
But Mama calls at sunset.
Her voice made small,
kid-like, lost. “She’s gone,”
she says. I nod. Hang up.
I drive despite a widening
blur of meaning. Who will
pray for me now? I lose
a stretch of highway to her hands,
knocked gnarled by overuse,
never again pressed to the stern
knowledge of her god’s wisdom,
for me, for Mama, for you.
I gasp at an abrupt blossom
of loss unspooling without
grace in my passenger seat.
I grip the wheel tighter, the sky
darkening with a worry so unlike
dawn, falling over my sense
of everything. I’m godless,
alien to everything, alone.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“Writing “Who Will Pray for Me Now” was very much a way of staying in conversation with my grandmother, even ten years after her death. I didn’t set out to write an elegy; it just kept forming inside me, reshaping everything around it like dark lace. I’ve learned that grief is like that: it rearranges you, whether you invite it or not. This poem came out of the long, slow sediment of great loss, and the clarity it eventually offered me. When I lost my grandmother, I lost one of the great loves of my life. And in writing about her absence, I began to see the ways we all become marked by grief, how it weaves itself into the fabric of our language. I’ve come to understand others more tenderly because of it. How many of us are quietly carrying someone we’ve lost, someone we still talk to when everything goes quiet? This poem is, in a way, a trace fossil of time: an imprint of love and heartbreak, still glowing with a pearlescent hope that the granular suffering of grief might mean something, anything, after all.”
Caitlin Annette Johnson is a backwoods, Mississippi-raised hayseed turned Queens-based queer with a kid and a dog and too much hope for so small a person. She has an MFA from Syracuse University and reads poetry for Bicoastal Review and Kitchen Table Quarterly. Her work can be found in Querencia Press, NonBinary Review, Constellations, Dunes Review, and others. She is a proud member of her local PTA and hosts a free weekly poetry workshop in her community.
Who Will Pray For Me Now?
Caitlin Johnson | Poetry, Summer 2025
for Annette Dorris Brand (1926-2015)
I am on the long highway
between this life and that,
beyond a glass-fed skyline,
beyond the Mason-Dixon,
a lonely little blue arrow
stuttering its way south again.
I touch the GPS. Tangible
motion, fast enough. In time.
But Mama calls at sunset.
Her voice made small,
kid-like, lost. “She’s gone,”
she says. I nod. Hang up.
I drive despite a widening
blur of meaning. Who will
pray for me now? I lose
a stretch of highway to her hands,
knocked gnarled by overuse,
never again pressed to the stern
knowledge of her god’s wisdom,
for me, for Mama, for you.
I gasp at an abrupt blossom
of loss unspooling without
grace in my passenger seat.
I grip the wheel tighter, the sky
darkening with a worry so unlike
dawn, falling over my sense
of everything. I’m godless,
alien to everything, alone.
__________________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“Writing “Who Will Pray for Me Now” was very much a way of staying in conversation with my grandmother, even ten years after her death. I didn’t set out to write an elegy; it just kept forming inside me, reshaping everything around it like dark lace. I’ve learned that grief is like that: it rearranges you, whether you invite it or not. This poem came out of the long, slow sediment of great loss, and the clarity it eventually offered me. When I lost my grandmother, I lost one of the great loves of my life. And in writing about her absence, I began to see the ways we all become marked by grief, how it weaves itself into the fabric of our language. I’ve come to understand others more tenderly because of it. How many of us are quietly carrying someone we’ve lost, someone we still talk to when everything goes quiet? This poem is, in a way, a trace fossil of time: an imprint of love and heartbreak, still glowing with a pearlescent hope that the granular suffering of grief might mean something, anything, after all.”
Caitlin Annette Johnson is a backwoods, Mississippi-raised hayseed turned Queens-based queer with a kid and a dog and too much hope for so small a person. She has an MFA from Syracuse University and reads poetry for Bicoastal Review and Kitchen Table Quarterly. Her work can be found in Querencia Press, NonBinary Review, Constellations, Dunes Review, and others. She is a proud member of her local PTA and hosts a free weekly poetry workshop in her community.