Juliet Patterson: Two Poems

A Narrative | Anon

A Narrative

Origami swans floating in the toilet.

The principles of gravity. She is talking
& talking.

A carton of owls spilling on the floor.

Eating Thai food.
Won-ton, wanton.

Everything blushing, failing, fading.

Paper birds stunted, polls dropping.

She is talking about phone banks, hail.

Her face is a red, red seed.

She wants to grow a good rutabaga
in the burial ground.

She says happiness, happiness
& isn't satisfied.

For the poem begins because she can see
thirty-one varieties of black
in capitalism.

At a bare minimum, the clock on the wall says three.

A bowl of plum sauce bathed in light.

Swans scattered like toys.

This is obviously about a person alone.
In another version, I was her wife.

I shall be her wife.

Anon

Fields instress Yellow
noise

the murmuring of bees


Dear She
writes to miss you

interrupts this ground


+ Enlarges the steady-
tilled


Anon, I

am teeming

torn

until Kansas

with the pupil, each
part of the body becoming a tool

under eye's lens

that the catch locks between just-
being & always being


Where my hands are cut
her fingers will be found


Inside

Poet's Biography:

Juliet Patterson's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Bellingham Review, Bloom, Conduit, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal, Washington Square, Typo, Verse and other magazines. Her book, The Truant Lover, was selected by Jean Valentine as the 2004 winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and will be published in Spring 2006. She lives in Minneapolis near the west bank of the Mississippi.