What is Little Prayers?
Little Prayers is a self-destructing art writing segment. With each instalment, the previous one deletes forever. The vital alchemy of a Little Prayer - short in length and lifespan - permits writing at its most personal and experimental. Feature your Little Prayers by responding to these prompts.
This week, not a burial, a resurrection.
Bhajan Hunjan - Leda and The Affair
I found him outside. A man much older than me,
jawline like the bones of a newborn fawn,
too soft one moment, too sharp the next.
His headlights turned their heads,
luminescent toes grazed over a rat
spilled from the city’s sewage.
Flies parted its fur and fed.
The wings, shameless and glutted,
beat praise into the meat.
I pretended his car was a white dove,
fluttering forth in the filth of the city.
Wind tore through my dark curls,
a thing that wanted me, for once.
If I were not awkward at the silence,
if loneliness didn’t gnaw like a stray,
if I hadn’t mistaken the wind’s movement
for freedom, it wouldn’t have been like this.
In the window’s voyeuristic glare, I looked
like someone else—some girl in a music video,
slow-motion, lips parted, Addison Rae
in Diet Pepsi, neck limp in the passenger seat,
pretty as roadkill. Though alive, I sat so still,
shining like a taxidermist’s prize, pretty
in a way that begged to be touched,
pretty in a way that meant nothing at all.
He took my wrist, placed it on himself,
as if I had reached for it, as if I had asked
to touch this small animal of heat.
Thought yes, maybe this is what feeling
wanted feels like. When the other invites
the warmth of you on theirs.
His apartment was cold and heavy.
He asked me to take my shirt off. I didn’t.
I sat so still, felt the air set over me
like resin, said no so quietly it felt like
I never spoke at all. Shame ebbed thick
in my throat, I had already seen myself
through so many eyes, already known the
ruin of my skin. His gaze moved over me
like fingers pressing for a wound.
And you know what?
Maybe I should lean into the image—
good girl, pornographic, offering a fantasy.
He wanted to film me on my knees.
Phone’s cold light refused to touch me,
except watch. I swallowed his shivers of ecstasy,
his pulse so warm in my throat, I couldn’t
tell it apart from mine. He never sent the video.
Kept it like a vein severed clean, a thing
that once pulsed for him. On the drive back,
cigarette burning low in his mouth,
gum wrenched dry between my teeth, he said
he had a wife. Asked if that bothered me.
I heard the wind answer in the absence of my
voice, saw the night aim its arrow at my mouth.
Across, light moved unwanted over a vulgar pigeon
masquerading as a dove on the pavements.
When the husband dropped me off, the taillights shrunk—
two red mouths swallowing a name he never learned.
Not a dove. Not something meant to rise.
- Written by Ali C
Burial - Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above
Side A - [past / future / interference]
Dream / fear. Burial sutures them together, fuses them into the same organism. The past reawakens, but differently. Not a burial. A resurrection.
I am the lord of what happens after. I am the ghost in the reverb, chasing itself through the delay tail, skimming the surface of the waveform, dissipating into the bitcrush. I stretch between the kicks, I loop but do not resolve. The signal decays and I decay with it. The dream chokes in its own recursion. Ecstasy deteriorates. The high fractures. The pleasure principle, fraying at its edges, revealing its own worn circuitry. Now the body twitches, jags; a stuttering machine, a breakbeat engine overheating, burning out, rerouting. I am the high one. I am the lord of ecstasy.
You were not there. But you still remember. A future we only recognise in hindsight. A past we long for but never inhabited. The halcyon glow of a UK rave scene already over before it was real. The rose-coloured memory of another's memory. A nostalgia industry running at full capacity. Everything pure. Everything intact. You were not there, but the feeling remains. The myth persists.
Burial reconstructs this dream from the inside. The memory is an aperture, opening and closing, never holding. The past seen through the flicker of a strobe. A sequence of missing frames. If he runs the simulation enough times, if he listens from every possible angle, maybe this time the feeling will remain. Maybe this time the moment will not slip away.
But ghosts belong to neither the past nor the present. Their coordinates are wrong.
The drop never comes. The drop is a lie.
Where Untrue is the ringing in your ears after the club (the imprint, the ghosts of the night, the hauntophony of basslines still trembling in the marrow) “Dreamfear” is the breakdown, the signal collapsing, the machine choking on its own loops, fighting for breath inside the reverb chamber.
- Written by Bryson Edward Howe
Nerys Johnson - Three Lady Artists and a Wheelchair in Venice
The fruit, not the root. It would be too easy to read rheumatism in Nerys Johnson's lines, solitude in her obsessive botany, recovery in her hurricane seasons of work, and the circumscribed flow of access in her watercolour's dyadic bloom. Nevertheless, Laing Art Gallery insists upon it; the ad in the display cabinet calls for a downstairs apartment in Venice for "three lady artists and a wheelchair"; a long film shows her practice, her arthritic hands. But it is the artist's late works - a wall full of flowers springing from the abyss - that indicate a horticulture less consigned to the body (or, as the gallery clumsily narrativizes, existing in spite of it), and rather to feed a rosetta stone familiar to artists, that inner cyclops. He chews on neon grass that is grassier than grass. The garden inside. It is her big, brown eyes that the film should focus on, heliotropic doors downloading propaganda for a Bifrost bulging down the occipital lobe. Is this what plants dream the surface is like whilst they are under it? Her colours yield to the precise higher key of sun, ultraviolet impressions left on the far back wall of the mind. There is nothing abstract once the door closes - brass-handled, auburn, between the scalp and the nape, the smell of the dugout, grassier than grass - water runs especially bright in the dark.
"clay into plaster
grey to white
form
and in my mind
green
mountain
fruits of mountain
mystery fruit
all these are there."
- Nerys Johnson
- Written by Caleb Carter
Saya Gray - SAYA
Side B - [no one's mouth is moving, but i hear my name]
It is difficult to place Saya Gray, but that is precisely the point. Her music doesn’t settle into an easy identity; it flickers, disperses, pop that refuses the fixed coordinates of genre (not in the tired, postmodern sense of eclecticism-as-branding, but in a deeper, more uncanny way). The question is whether this dispersal is an opening or a closure. In the dub-echo, in the reverb: a voice slips through time, distended and doubled, spectral.
But what is being haunted here? Not just a time, not just a sound, but a condition, an unplaceable melancholy, a feeling of being caught between frequencies. Saya's music resists full presence as if it’s already receding even as you listen. There is no vinyl crackle, no overt pastiche. Instead, the ghost is in the structure itself. Songs that refuse resolution, shiver and break apart, stretch into silence, reform. Melodies that sound like she's been interrupted mid-thought or only half-remembered. Fragments of voice, slipping in and out, as if she is unsure whether she still exists.
⊹ was it real? ⊹
(or just the reverb speaking?)
But when I spoke to Saya last year, she told me, “I've calmed down a lot in my life and I think that's changed a lot of the music. You'll hear it and be like, 'Whoa there are fully formed ideas for the first time'. But I feel like I've fully formed my life now. I feel like I finally have a home, you know? I have cats that I take care of and a lease. I feel like the next album is a representation of that, finally.”
It's true, but there is still an ache in the way Saya is constructed. There's a difference in visiting a memory and living in the past she sings on the album's lead single "SHELL (OF A MAN)", introducing this as a more traditional 'breakup album' (and what is a breakup if not the searching for signs of life in those absent spaces and moments; an incompleteness that isn’t lack, but a structural condition?). By the time we get to Saya's 'straightest' song "PUDDLE (OF ME)" with her haunting refrain, You know how obsessed I can get with your needle and thread pulling in and out of me, the album does begin to unspool, finding new forms in the most British of modes, the dub-echo and the breakbeat, sounds always in the process of leaving themselves behind. Hauntings don’t just live in the remnants, but in the way these songs stretch their hands toward what’s already gone (an unmade bed, a soft bruise); not in the glitch, not in the interference, but in the knowing, we only have ourselves at the end of it all. Fitting for someone whose music has always been inherently insular, self-referential, and composed entirely of disassembly and reassembly of cherry-picked parts of her self; in this way SAYA is no different: even as Saya's music gestures toward cohesion, toward something more fully formed, it remains marked by a kind of absence.
Because what does it mean to disappear into your own music? To become fugitive in your own sound? Even as a listener, a song can infect you. It lodges in the tissue, in the memory, in the quiet corners of your room, between the body and its shadow. When I first heard "IF THERE'S NO SEAT IN THE SKY (WILL YOU FORGIVE ME???)" it did exactly that. This is not what Spotify had lazily labelled "anti-pop", though in its dissolution, in its frayed edges, it reveals something more solid than pop's usual gummy surfaces. Like any form of haunting, it doesn’t just recall a past moment; it marks the contours of something missing, something that might never have been there in the first place.
i left a note in the reverb /
but the room swallowed it whole /
now the walls hum back at me /
a song i almost wrote
- Written by Bryson Edward Howe
Credits:
Ali C is a poet and author of the forthcoming chapbook, NIGHT OF THE FIRE (Ethel, 2025). Poems have been published in Stanchion, Diode Poetry Journal, and others. Read more at www.alixyz.club
Caleb Carter is a co-founder/editor of The Big Ship
Bryson Edward Howe is a co-founder/editor of The Big Ship
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