Lord make me a channel
of wonderings. Make me
a yellow magnolia, crown
like an O’Keeffe flower,
fold and shadow, gingerpeel.
Save me the tumble of
guilt-making and ruminate.
Give me blossom. Can the word
miracle weaken from overuse
like love? Are repetition
and erosion kin? Keep me obsessed
with this woman, Lord,
increase my bewilderment.
I do not ask to be understood
but understand, to sit at the
feet of my lover and know
they connect to her ankles,
her spotted calves, let me look
with certainty, marvelous at the fact
of her knees, and when she steps
show me the white clover springing
from her absence in the grass.
Mary Beth Becker is a lesbian poet living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A 2025-2026 Loft Mentor Series fellow in poetry, her work has been published in Hobart, Gulf Stream, South Florida Poetry Journal and West Trade Review, among others. She co-founded Minnesota’s first online support group for victim-survivors of domestic violence. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a Best-of-the-Net nominee and has received support from the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and Sundress Academy of the Arts. She was raised in the woods north of Omaha, Nebraska.