Natalie Eleanor Patterson: I'm Not Impressed

Photo: Joanna C. Valente

GREEK CHORUS

By now I’ve seen it all, seen the pregnant girls climb in
& out of bathtubs with their long hair covering their swollen breasts,
seen the blood flow free from their bellies & heads.
When women kill, they kill with poison, but by God, these were just

children, lying in bathtubs with their hair hanging limp,
calling dimly for a mother or a midwife. That’s when I would come,
heavy with poison, to watch them be killed by the very gods
we all worshiped in our time, though our time is deader

than the girls, now that it’s come like a mother in the dim.
I could only watch & sing & try to forget their names, 
for it makes the worshiping easier when they’re dead.
No one expects the dark to have eyes, to stand in judgment like this.

I can only watch & sing them their mothers’ lullabies 
while the blood pours out, each girl a surface pocked with holes. 
No one expects the dark to have eyes, but I do, though by now
I’ve seen it all, I’m not impressed by godly power anymore.

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Natalie Eleanor Patterson is a half-Cuban femme lesbian poet and editor from suburban Georgia currently working on her BA in English and Creative Writing at Salem College in Winston-Salem, NC. She has work featured in Incunabula, Neologism, Sinister Wisdom, Hunger Mountain, Collision, and Club Plum Literary Journal. In 2018 she received the Katherine B. Rondthaler Award in Poetry from Salem College, and her poem “blink” received a Best of the Net 2018-2019 nomination. She works as an assistant editor for Jacar Press and a reader for One Magazine and is currently editing an anthology of new LGBTQ writing for Jacar Press. Find her on Twitter @natalieepatt or at poetnatalie.com.