[In July the whole city]
In July the whole city smells decayed, like a vase of flowers going to rot, &; you’ve got the sure sense
of a wet thing molding. Peppers ripen in the black dirt &; you pick them so the dogs don’t get sick,
give them to the woman who’s hired you to feed pills to her aging Boston terrier, who will have
seizures every other day until it dies. Cell towers blink in a mid-afternoon storm &; you have to be
good, you cannot farm your pain for poems, you have to find something else to say besides O God,
O God, I’m terrified of being wrong. You’re wrong about everything, even your terror, you keep nearly
fainting on the downswing of the week, crying in the shower as the index hits a hundred. Every
morning at sunrise there’s a great heron by the lake, always looking out over the water in the same
place by the cypress roots. You’re sure she was once a person. You don’t think you’re a victim; you’re
sure it would feel different from this. You keep feeling things that can’t be measured on a scale from
one to ten &; you keep dreaming about things that haven’t happened yet but O God you wish they
would. You wish you’d gone sailing when you had the chance. You wish you’d punched a hole
through yourself with all that expensive bourbon, let that older woman take you to bed, pressed time
into a flat circle. You wish it was winter: horse sense, lumber, one hundred leagues of snow.
Natalie Eleanor Patterson is a poet, editor, and instructor with an MFA in poetry from Oregon State University. She is the author of the chapbook Plainhollow (dancing girl press, 2022) and the editor of Dream of the River (Jacar Press, 2021), and has work featured in Sinister Wisdom, CALYX, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is Managing Editor of Jacar Press and a PhD student in poetry. Find her at poetnatalie.com.