Return
RETURN to watch a great deal of elsewhere inhabiting the shore mute, but implicative as flowers struggling at our feet beachgrass trapping a forgotten hand ~ How something dies out in us: the conversation, the hour made out of nothing but relationships of again as faint as the place where one unhinges its hope, I thought the sea ~ O, beautiful whale, say, calving the one to draw as we drown filing the water’s tongue you know: the leap goes over you, always ‘not stillness,’ said, but the movement traced, scattered ‘black verse the turn and the turn’ ~ What’s below us the wave-belly lovely singly suspended fingering walls in speech we wish to join again out of context ~ June June like like it then unhoused palm in the sky cold then waves bending guttered strip of beach flee, you say of again a winter and hours destroyed as moving
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Juliet Patterson’s first book, The Truant Lover, was selected by Jean Valentine as the 2004 winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and was a 2007 finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in 26, Pebble Lake Review, Swerve, Water~Stone Review and other magazines. She teaches poetry and creative writing in Minneapolis through the College of St. Catherine, Hamline University, and The Loft Literary Center.