Natalie Eleanor Patterson

Sonnet Northwest

It was the landscape I loved: driving north, the oaks giving way

to evergreens, orange pines, fog lifting off the river gorge

at the state line, a scenery knifed in two. Clouds canting low,

wild dogs roving in the blue dark, as if the car we rode in

was nothing. It was nothing: inside, the varied psychodramas

of neither lover able to explain why she loved the other,

I don’t fucking know & I probably shouldn’t & We’re not

stopping for the night this time. Outside, the earth rising

to meet more of itself, no divide between one green body

& the next, the interstate brutal with loose viscera

carpeting the asphalt between each mountain pass, a stain

for every deer that got in the way. It was the landscape I loved,

half a moon for every highway, counting herds at the edge of the road,

trying not to become a stain myself, an offering, a blight.

Kraton Divine

            after “Dahmer Does Hollywood” by Amigo the Devil

She said that sometimes it’s not the body, but what you see,

                        speaking of fleas that will jump when your finger comes near

but cannot be touch. It’s true, the truest love

                        is panic, spending my time parsing the alchemy

of another body, Commercial Street in the south district,

                        trying not to step on broken glass in the parking lot.

Some nights, just dead meat living. She’s capable of making

                        me disappear. 

We made the drive back to my place less & less,

                        & anyway it always rains on Interstate 5.

Sign by the exit reading                                  KRATOM

                        DIVINE,

& along that backwater turn-off, red-

                        tailed hawks would sweep down over prey in the wild grass,

playing along with the game she made of them. I used to say

                        that I would scatter little frozen mice in the fields

each morning, flinging fistful after fistful of already-dead bodies,

                        & like me, they too would thaw in the heat

of something that wanted to consume them.

                        We counted those birds as they circled the sky, watching

for the telltale blood. In the end, all I did was kiss

                        the tattoo on her thigh, the one that reads sorry or forgive me,

next to the one that only asks why.

We Must All Eat Beautiful Women

            after a line by Anne Sexton

I am the rain come again        the side wound

in the tree where the moss points north

I am the stupid baby        the drowned rat

doll where children point out places

they should not have been touched

a red miasma        fracture of space

in the whitest page                the smallest

illness        blood in the rain before it ever

stained your bedsheets        I am        the dark wave

in the dive bar        in the hot light

where a man screamed & you called it music

I am the body  under the body                    under

the omen writ large upon your wall

the juniper blooded like light

the branch that looks like a human remain

rising out of Snake River        deer

carcass                         the rain

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 (dancing girl press, 2022) and the editor of Dream of the River (Jacar Press, 2021), and has work featured or forthcoming in Sinister Wisdom, Hunger Mountain, CALYX, and elsewhere. She has received awards in poetry from Salem College as well as Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations. She is Managing Editor of Jacar Press, an editor for One magazine, and a reader for the Julie Suk Award. She is currently pursuing her PhD in poetry. You can find her on Twitter @natalieepatt and on Instagram @imagine.nat.

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Jan Freeman

The Queer Picture

Because she adored me

she will marry me when I’m dead

She will find me stamping

like a stallion in a petting zoo

my father said to my mother

who said to me

when the eulogies ended

and the guests departed:

Chaps on, cowgirl, you have pleasure

and happiness waiting

Giddyap, cowgirl

lasso yourself our stallion

and marry him marry him marry him

now that your father is dead

The Unspoken

When I was a girl, my family camped

on an island in Lake George

We grilled fish for breakfast, read comic books

swam off the stony edges beside the dock

I loved one book: The Swiss Family Robinson 

During August afternoons, I tumbled through its pages from my nests of pine needles

as the others swam, searching for dimes and minnows

Dear falling down tent

Dear campfire and speckled metal kettle of boiling coffee milk

Dear bats that watched over me, dear Milky Way, dear sunrise

Dear memory that erases what the heart cannot bear

Dear second-grade teacher, Mrs. Reif, who showed me

how to write poems, which proved I was alive

Today a breeze pulls me from the east shore to the west, from the future to the past

I loved my father up to the sky and back

When I grow up I’ll be like him, I said to myself

at seven, at twenty-three, at sixty

Now the lake is covered in tiny waves

It swallows the clouds, the herons, the dime-shaped sun

When I grow up I’ll be a boulder in the forest or a bear or a lake

When I grow up fishes and grasses will bloom inside me, dragonflies will touch my skin

On a recent morning infinite O’s of light reminded me

I too contain multitudes

You’re such a worrier, my father said, my mother said

my sisters, my brother teased

in the brick house, in the stone house

in the toppling tent on the island

A cougar shaped like a cloud ran across the sky

The cougar became a headless horse

The horse became a woman resting on her back

with a child on her belly

My mother wept and didn’t weep enough tears to fill a lake

My father’s sad and angry patients wandered in and out of the telephone

over the front lawn, where they followed the sheepdog to the basement office

and into the chair across from the desk that once was the dining-room table

The patients’ lives were written in pale green steno pads and stacked

on shelves, then stuffed into filing cabinets

All the voices in the house rose through the floors, they sank through the ceilings

One little piggy, two little piggies, three little piggies, four

Happiness rolled us between the lightning bugs and treetops

between the dock and the long flat stones we leapt from each summer

as I imagined we were the Swiss Family Robinson, with no need to be saved

Then happiness released us to the concerned, the kind

to the seemingly unaware, to the cruel, to the perpetually cheerful yet miserable

who released us to the buoyant loneliness of our sky-blue suffering

which released us into a current of perpetual solitude

as if we were little beavers swimming into the absence of everything

believing in our connection to each other, to childhood and the lake

that had long ago reflected our bodies and faces into the dumb anguish of forgiveness

The Sisters

I am the no in the throat of their eyes

fractals of fences, ceilings of string

Three heads smile from a wooden frame

then fall asleep in solitude’s scheme

Wherever they are—on a boat on a beach

at a metal table on a city street

I remember them in their naked need

at three at six at seventeen

The cards in our hands fell over the house

and scattered like bunnies in the fox’s dream

There was no one to catch us except for ourselves

Like cards we scattered, weightless with need

No to the palm of kindness and love

that carries the bag for payback’s high price

No to the I-owe-you of strife

as if sacrifice can forfeit time

No to the thrum of hunger, greed

No to pleasure: what gives will take

No to the penalty: joy as pain

No to anyone calling our names

No to friendship, debt’s thick breath

No to the rage of attention’s reign

No to his thumbprints’ virile gain

No to her melodies of blame

No to the voices like flocks of birds

whose decibels fall and rise unseen

No to isolation’s domain

with its choke and throttle and empty brain

No to the condemnations claimed

when achievements mollify childhood’s mark

Comfort? The solace of memory’s gain

This is our twisted rope of shame

Family as Fractal

Who is the dreaded, the loved, the cruel?

Is the murderer father?

Was I murderous, too?

Was I his rescuer, rescued, participant?

Am I my mother?

Was I murdered too?

If I am my father, if I am my mother

if my sisters and brother are mirrors, one face

Can one aberration offend replication

and alter it fully?

What is pity or hatred?

Is loyalty warranted?

If sister is mother, if brother is father

if father was grandfather, everyone, same

is my difference their difference?

my failure their failure?

Is their hatred self-hatred?

Is my sanity sane?

If my niece is my uncle

is my nephew my aunt?

Is my uncle my grandmother?

My lost child myself?

Whose laughter and boredom

spin silk with disdain?

Is my shame my brother’s?

Is his shame my father’s?

Is my rage my sisters’

my mother’s, my own?

Does geometry prove that we replicate history:

family, oligarch, innocent, mute?

Then the future is written

my life is determined

my desire, my love

my own grief like row houses

precise replications

of what I escaped

Jan Freeman is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Blue Structure, which was championed by Ilya Kaminsky (Calypso Editions, 2016). She completed her new manuscript, The Odyssey of Yes and No, during a recent MacDowell fellowship. Poems from this collection have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Rail, North American Review, Plume, Poetry, Painted Bride Quarterly, Salamander, and other publications. She is the founder and former director of Paris Press. Long ago, she earned an MFA at NYU, studying with Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, Ruth Stone, and Nina Cassian. The work of David Shapiro and Louise Bourgeois are her constant companions. Currently, she teaches ekphrastic poetry workshops and the MASS MoCA Writing Through Art Poetry Retreats. www.janfreeman.net.

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Elliott batTzedek

Conception Waltz

late afternoon out to the barn

key and Motor Medic in hand

rain of rust, door rolls open—

’57 F150, once with custom pipes

and running boards

door locks never used not even once

lift the steel hood, tighten the cables

on the battery new just last week

pull out the cardboard scrap to check

the geography of the countries of stains

chrome of the door handle that’s flaked in your hands

since Dad had to lift you up to open it yourself

hinges and your voice both

grinding scratches so long

since either prayed

the smell of him might still remain

the imprint of his left thumb on

the flat of the choke throttle

youtube says pull it one half inch

but it’s the heart that looks now, seeing

more than a camera ever could

pull the lever as far as it will come

spray WD-40, slide it in and out again

until you feel you’ve reached the end

when were keys ever so small?

Turning and hoping

turning and holding breath

turning and a click and a sputter

and then the waltz of feet & hand:

pedal choke clutch

pedal choke clutch

pedal choke clutch

sputter and die

sputter and gasp

sputter and shudder

and then

the closest purr to the purr the engine purred

for him that this truck will know again

Let the engine run

lie down across the seat

decades of dust and still the smell

of hay and ponies and the Carhartts

soaked with gas and oil he

wore home from work

six days a week

perfume of a life lived with

limited choices, pony manure enough

to grow tomatoes wider than

a supper plate

stretching out along my back the jerky

engine’s idle, the rocking of the rhythm

to which I was conceived

Singin’ this will be the day

How much wood would

a woodchuck chuck

if a woodchuck had a

pickup truck, a chainsaw, an axe dull,

and one sharp awl?

1 cord 2 cords 3 cords, more

10 cords 11 cords a dozen cords haul!

I have a rocket in my pocket

I have no time to play but time anyway

to eat my peas with honey

which kept them on the knife, until

not last night but the night

before when 24 robbers came

to my door.

Scholastic Book Club, A Rocket in My Pocket:

the rhymes and chants of young Americans,

best 25¢ I ever spent on a

book, my source book, my head

when left too quiet begins

to chant these poems, beats of a life

in a predictable 4/4, comfortable

cadence of country music.

Eastbound and down, loaded up and

lonely teenage broncin’ buck, pink carnation,

pickup truck, I knew I was out of

luck the day the music

Ossuary

boy do I have a bone to pick with you, bones, so make

no bones about it but rather better bone up on it now

that you’re the rag and bone man, dancing a final

dog and pony show, throw me a bone, I’ll grab hold tight,

as if that were all my life is now, which is today’s

bone of contention

come look close then closer, to see what was bred

in my bones, yes we’ll dig for the bones in it, measure

the skeletons that skulk in my closet, and after give rest

to my weary bones

the doctor says: bones are covered by a thin layer of tissue called the periosteum

knick knack paddy whack the quickest dog

gets the fat off the bone, the slowest suckles

meal out of marrow while my bones

cleaveth to my skin, and to my flesh—

about this, there are most surely no bones but

dem bones, dem dry dry bones

the doctor says: it is the nerves in the periosteum that “feel” bone pain

dying rot that is my bone closet, bitterest

closet where my boners were forced to hide, my want

as dry as a bone coat, mouth crammed so full of bone

dust and sawdust that I’ll never know the taste of what

the preacher said: the good is oft interred with their bones

the doctor says: and for this bone pain there is no remedy

oh tales of blood and bone, the talking bone,

the telling bone, rattling bones, tattling bones,

rolled them bones and took my chance

still Death it was got the bigger half

of my wishbone

fe fi foh fum

Death smells the blood of every one

and grinds their bones to make

his bread, here at bone idle, here

at bone dry, here where you can make

no bones about that

Wedding Dance

Lawfully married at twenty-five husband

lawfully married at fifteen wife,

two faces, startled, they’d not expected the flash

two hands, posed by order on the knife.

Two faces, paled, foregrounded by the flash

anxious hands, trembling, so photo’s blurry knife.

Can you believe so-late-to-be-married husband?

What is she doing, so-young-to-be-married wife?

He’s marrying who? husband,

wed so soon after death had come for his life—

watching his best friend burn in drag race crash—

then drafted, so people were happy he found a wife.

On base the minister said too young so they dashed  

to find any preacher who’d declare man and wife,

there, ’58 in Fort Hood, watching Elvis drive past, and that

was the day’s story they told the rest of their lives,

these newly weds, for whom keeping secrets was custom

and silence and lies just how you tried to save your life.

Husband to mask grief, wife, a do-anything-dash

to leave father’s house, so focus the camera on the shiny knife!

Secrets crushed under silence so bestly, bestly kept, and

then soon a baby, then soon two more, and so they grew a life

pinned down in photos, truths dark backgrounded by the flash.

Look—he, a trying-to-be husband, look—she, a loving wife.

Elliott batTzedek is a Pushcart-prize nominated poet and liturgist. She is the recipient of the Robert Bly translation prize, judged by Martha Collins, and a Leeway Foundation Art and Change Award. She works in four slightly different parts of the bookselling industry, and also as a liturgist for Jewish communities across the U.S. Her poems and translations have been published in American Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, The Broadkill Review, Lilith, I-70 Review, Hunger Mountain Review, Sakura Review, Apiary, Cahoodaloodaling, Naugatuck River Review, Poemeleon, and Philadelphia Stories. Her chapbook the enkindled coal of my tongue was published in January 2017 by Wicked Banshee Press. A chapbook of translations from Shez, A Necklace of White Pearls, is forthcoming from Moonstone Press in 2024.

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