Notes On Mirrors, Already Lost
Everything after aches
river & bones &
the unsaid naming itself
endlessly. My son
comes to me in dreams
and I reach
for needle & thread
to close the tear
at his knee.
This morning I found
ants in the saltshaker, a pattern
repeated in the new snow
peppered with black walnuts.
I confess, with my tongue
I press His body
to the roof of my mouth,
sometimes I think rose petal,
sometimes blister.
—
This selection comes from Patty Paine’s chapbook Feral, available from Imaginary Friend Press! Purchase your copy here!
Patty Paine is the author of Grief & Other Animals (forthcoming from Accents Publishing), The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing), Feral (Imaginary Friend Press), Elegy & Collapse (Finishing Line Press), co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Garnet Publishing & Ithaca Press) and The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf (Berkshire Academic Press). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird, Verse Daily, The Atlanta Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and other publications. She is the founding editor of diode poetry journal and Diode Editions. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar where she teaches writing and literature.
Andrew Koch’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Bluestem, Connotation Press, Mojo, Rust + Moth, and others. Although a Tennessee-native, Andrew presently lives in Spokane, Washington with his wife and cat while teaching literature and pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at Eastern Washington University.
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