an essay about weddings & earthquakes & bears oh my!
I take 2 tylenol with a side of earthquake.
I am almost dumb enough to dance.
I keep trying to high-five the moon
but I am still too small. still too quiet.
I am wildly inaccurate. the days grow
shorter as everything hibernates: bears,
the throat lozenge caught in my throat, more bears.
I keep waking up expecting to be drowning in salt.
if you plant a panic attack in the garden, will anxiety
bloom like the somei yoshino in japan, falling
to its end only a week later? leigh, I wish we
had married in the forest, surrounded by deer
& dirt, meters high of linden. you would’ve worn
the dress still hanging in the guest closet,
still wrapped, still & always
untouched.
an essay about evolution
people are committing crimes in space now & we might begin nuking hurricanes. oh hell,
well, whatever, some things still stay the same. my mornings are still coffee & cigarettes,
my afternoons still just mornings with a larger sun. I never not welcome the strange
adventures between the bedsheets, but the days are growing skyscraper long. I just want to
pet a dinosaur, netflix-&-chill with my wife, birth bees & bears that eat what bees sell to lip
balm & mugs of tea. I am rotting gently. quietly disheveled. living is a movie I refuse to buy
a ticket to. yet & still I sing—still we in the damp cool of dawn, mismatched lips pressing
against this future history lesson—the minutes before the alarm, still still still.
an essay about the hymn caught in my throat
the tightness in my chest
never ceases
to still love, still
to remember
the morning & the other
morning—how night shrinks
upwards as if it never felt
fallen—
I am it seems I am
the same as you,
stolen, left
for the smallness of night
& the temper of the birdsong—
nothing
but the intro
______________
Lee Patterson's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, Thin Air Magazine, Entropy, Queen Mob's Teahouse, and Unbroken. His chapbook, I get sad, will be published by Ethel Zine in late 2019.
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