A Tithe to move my blood

Natalie Eleanor Patterson

I can’t say what the horror of loving her was.
I do & do not live there anymore.

Each day I remember less & less & still I can’t say:
rising from the foot of her bed, from the plastic chair

at the breakfast table to adjust the slant of light
coming in through the window—

the unsmiling arch of her shoulders
over her plate while eating,

looking at me in the way animals do.

Stains on the sheets, ordinary, numerous,
& other things I can’t say. When I left,

I left a bar of goat’s milk soap in the bathroom cabinet,
ashamed of wanting—not to live, exactly, but finally

not to die—small tax to go back home, a tithe
to move my blood. Now, I’m ashamed

of what she called slander, which is telling
the whole story, but there are gaps

in the heaven of language, & those gaps are where
my body lives, something I could not have invented,

a space I can only dream into, & do:

Natalie Eleanor Patterson is a poet and editor from Georgia. She is the author of the chapbook Plainhollow and the editor of Dream of the River, and has work featured or forthcoming in Sinister Wisdom, Hunger Mountain, CALYX, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at Oregon State University.