by Jesse Sorrell

Adrian Pelletier, *Swimming in Stars,* digital photograph, 2014. Courtesy of Unsplash.

Vespers

Jesse Sorrell | OCT 2025 | Issue 49

with Joy Harjo

Say the world begins at a wooden table.
Not the carpenter who built the table,
nor the tree that provides the wood,
but the world seated in chairs at a wooden table—
one hemisphere rounding toward the void
and the other reaching for celestial height,
with feet tucked beneath a horizontal plane
and crumbs falling from mouths-to-table.

When I was a child with a just-dead dad,
I sat at the kitchen table after my mother
and brother had gone to bed. I was afraid
to fall asleep so I opened to the stars
the wooden blinds that my mother had closed.
I sat underneath the globed lights to study
parts of the eye for my fifth-grade homework,
my pupils dilating against the fear-white
of my eyes and what I could not see in darkness.

When I was old enough to live my longing,
a classmate and I stumbled down a lamp-lit hill.
We were blind with teenage grief and vodka
and determined to fuck in the empty house
where an adult son shot dead
his aging parents at their breakfast table
before exploding his brain with a bullet
through the roof of his mouth. I wanted
to inhabit a room inside a house
with pain larger than my own,
to feel death penetrating my body
thrust into rapture against the walls
sprayed with blood and the shrapnel of bone.

Our feet creaked the wood of the front porch and
moonlight glowed the paint on the bolted front door.
We cupped our transgressive eyes with our hands
flush against the front windows to see inside.
I saw nothing but the eye of my heart saw everything.
I dragged us off the porch and we sat on the front steps
with our backs to the house. He laid his body across my lap,
dividing the hemispheres of my body with his torso.
I looked into his eyes reflecting the winter night sky.

In the black ice of his eyes, I saw
the story of a boy shooting himself
into the constellation of violent men.
I saw myself falling like a star.
He closed his eyes and I studied
the lines of his jaw meeting
the muscles of his neck pulsing
to the rhythm of his heart pumping
the pain of a boy. He lifted his face
into the night between us and desire
flipped between our bodies pressed against trees,
against the frozen earth, against our every story.

When I sit with a mother of a dead daughter
at her kitchen table, spring does not come.
She is pregnant with a son who will die
like her daughter. A salt and peppered coonhound
born before her oldest living child
rests at her feet. She places one hand on her heart,
the other over her womb, and we close our eyes.
We are two bodies breathing for one body
growing toward death as we do inside a body.

She imagines summer one day returning and
growing tall the pecan and peach trees planted
in their orchard scattered with her daughter’s ashes.
She imagines her living and dead children
playing together in the treehouse
built to sustain the storms of their grieving.
She imagines her sorrow sinking the sun and
her two living children coming inside at dusk
for peach pie with Venus bright in the rusted sky.
She imagines the night sky as a song
woven with the voices of her dead children
singing starlight through the open window. Now I see.

When night comes, I close the blinds to outside eyes,
feed the cats, and freshen their water. I look at the art
I hung with my hands and made with my heart as a boy.
I turn off the lights and sit at my tall wooden kitchen table.
My feet dangle above the floor, my hands rest in my lap and
my spine reaches for the stars. I close my eyes and imagine
sitting across from me the world full of humans
spilling our animal lives between living and dying.
I rest in the space after inhale and
cats watch the words leave my mouth I’m not afraid of the dark, Ma.

Jesse Sorrell writes to listen between physical and subtle form. He offers spiritual care in community-based, pediatric hospice & palliative care, bereavement, and other therapeutic settings. He lives surrounded by trees and animals in Apex, NC and is often found in water.