I Keep Forgetting to Mention I Was in Love

                        But it was the explanation for everything—
bruised landscape, starving myself out of a touched skin, my loose hair

                        a string of wet stars paving the cellar stairs.
I was paid nothing to serve as witness.

                        What am I supposed to say—I’m still not over Idaho?

The issue, of course, is that time passes,
                        but it doesn’t pass me. I’ve made it almost to twenty-four

without living a single day of twenty-three.
                        Clawmarks in the doorframe are only cute for so long.

I text my friends, Let’s have a crisis together, & they ask
                        if I’m okay, but they no longer ask if I’m eating.

Through the phone, Dad said Time heals all— before Mom cut him off.
                        I just don’t know what to tell you anymore, honey.

Down South, scrub pine scratches the sky like a rash,
                        & I’m no closer to healing the burn on my hand.

I try to capture in still life the way it feels to wait for you:

                        I write, Verses of time lay horizontal in the patio light.
I write, Evening birds cry out as if in pain.

Natalie Eleanor Patterson is a poet, editor, and instructor from Atlanta, Georgia, with an MFA in poetry from Oregon State University. She is the author of the chapbook Plainhollow and the editor of Dream of the River, and has work featured or forthcoming in Sinister Wisdom, Hunger Mountain, CALYX, and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD student in poetry.