blown out elegy
along the shoreline
shells of mollusks
the neck of a broken bottle
even water has a pulse
the sun pounds the sky white
the waves babble
i grieve
the sun squares itself
on white walls
splinters the bowl of apples
grown from graft
once i was young
and laughed loudly
had thorns in my hair
now the grass grows
white and the mailbox
closing&opening&closing
gives nothing
once i didn’t struggle
to recall your face
we were beautiful
nothing was bandaged
we had no idea what
couldn’t happen would happen
Patty Paine is the author of Grief & Other Animals, The Sounding Machine, and three chapbooks. She edited Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry and The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf. Her poems, reviews, and visual works have appeared in Blackbird, Adroit, Gulf Stream, Lomography, Thrush, The South Dakota Review, and other publications. She is the founding editor of Diode Poetry Journal and Diode Editions and is Director of Liberal Arts & Sciences at VCUarts Qatar.