3 poems by Lee Patterson

an essay about weddings & earthquakes & bears oh my!

I take 2 tylenol with a side of earthquake.

I am almost dumb enough to dance.

I keep trying to high-five the moon

but I am still too small. still too quiet.

I am wildly inaccurate. the days grow

shorter as everything hibernates: bears,

the throat lozenge caught in my throat, more bears.

I keep waking up expecting to be drowning in salt.

if you plant a panic attack in the garden, will anxiety

bloom like the somei yoshino in japan, falling

to its end only a week later? leigh, I wish we

had married in the forest, surrounded by deer

& dirt, meters high of linden. you would’ve worn

the dress still hanging in the guest closet,

still wrapped, still & always

untouched.

an essay about evolution 

people are committing crimes in space now & we might begin nuking hurricanes. oh hell,

well, whatever, some things still stay the same. my mornings are still coffee & cigarettes,

my afternoons still just mornings with a larger sun. I never not welcome the strange

adventures between the bedsheets, but the days are growing skyscraper long. I just want to

pet a dinosaur, netflix-&-chill with my wife, birth bees & bears that eat what bees sell to lip

balm & mugs of tea. I am rotting gently. quietly disheveled. living is a movie I refuse to buy

a ticket to. yet & still I sing—still we in the damp cool of dawn, mismatched lips pressing

against this future history lesson—the minutes before the alarm, still still still. 

an essay about the hymn caught in my throat

the tightness in my chest 

never ceases

to still love, still 

to remember 

the morning & the other

morning—how night shrinks 

upwards as if it never felt 

fallen—

I am it seems I am 

the same as you,

stolen, left 

for the smallness of night 

& the temper of the birdsong—

nothing

but the intro

______________

Lee Patterson's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, Thin Air Magazine, Entropy, Queen Mob's Teahouse, and Unbroken. His chapbook, I get sad, will be published by Ethel Zine in late 2019.