Patty Paine
Reading the ending first
I grieve, thin places, churches
and monasteries, far away. Again,
the room is dreaming of mountains.
Holy book, a sudden dark passage,
a flickering there in the forgotten
space behind mirrors.
A bruise starts with a body.
The ending started, and I drove
this flesh, refusing to believe
everything was burning.
Patty Paine is the author of Grief & Other Animals, The Sounding Machine, and three chapbooks. Her poems, reviews, and visual works have appeared in Blackbird, Adroit, Gulf Stream, The Denver Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, The South Dakota Review, and other publications. She is the founding editor of Diode Poetry Journal and Diode Editions.