All in by Dayna Patterson

Our Lady of Not Forgetting

SWWIM Every Day
by Dayna Patterson

by Dayna Patterson

The big things, obviously. Birthdays, and how old. Anniversaries, and what number. When to pick up the beloved child from school. But the small things, too. Field trip permission slips. Planetarium tickets. Watering the philodendron, its tumble of parched foliage like yellow banners signaling distress. When my mother came to visit, she wiped six years’ dust off each leaf using her thumb. Now it can breathe, she said. How could I forget? Match our minds to the task of ticking every box, even the ones in the basement crawling with roaches. Among all the to-doing, let us not forget the pink dogwood. Even if we tread in dog shit, Lady, let us not forget to look up when we pass. Colonoscopy. Mammogram. Dentist. The email, or letter, or text, or line of a poem we’ve been meaning to write. Tie a scrap of yarn around our wrists. Inscribe reminders, impermanent tattoos, in the sail of skin between pointer and thumb. A red asterisk for meteor shower. A black L for library, late fines mounting up to catastrophe. Prick our memory from its slump on the couch, so we recall: How to rouse for a blood moon. How to release the trapped animal of breath. How to steal the tooth-pearl tucked beneath our children’s dreams.

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Dayna Patterson is the author of Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). Her creative work has appeared recently in POETRY, AGNI, and Passages North, among others. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre and a co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. See more at daynapatterson.com.

Gertrude on artum nuptias

SWWIM Every Day
by Dayna Patterson

by Dayna Patterson

Grief wolfed me from the inside gnawed my

spine and I could roll over and suffer or dig a

pit and bait it flay the beast on my marriage

bed I chose the shovel I chose the hunter’s

knife to slit grief scrotum to throat and no I

didn’t know I took a murderer as husband

and please keep in mind married so long I’d

acquired the habit of twoness two minds two

crowns two pairs of eyes the worst word in

any language alone 

                                           and letting go I felt 

formal as a stone splitting and a brother-in-

law’s suit was a solution to my un-halving

yes frailty if frail is to bury my dead and seize

fruit growing over the grave and if I had to

do it again perhaps Polonius this time yes

even in his fussy grandiloquence I tell you

remarriage would’ve still been overhasty still

a thorn to my son still this old heart’s

cleaving

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Dayna Patterson's creative work has appeared recently in Hotel Amerika, So to Speak, Western Humanities Review, and Zone 3. She is a former managing editor of Bellingham Review, founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre, and poetry editor for Exponent II Magazine. She is a co-editor (with Tyler Chadwick and Martin Pulido) of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry (Peculiar Pages, 2018). Connect with her at: www.daynapatterson.com.