Black Dog
Grantham, Lincolnshire 

Up north, we drink the fear away: pitchers of daiquiris, whiskey neat. We winter at the pub in this town of industrial yards and liquor stores, where even the rain falls with a sheen of rust. We learn how to read timetables, how to love the heavy burn of a train as it passes, throwing us back onto the platform with a force that reminds us of love. At night, the farmers’ fields grow arms and take us to bed, but I have been praying again after a long sabbatical from bargaining with the dark. The cabbie told us the story of how six students drove into the blind night and crashed into the stone wall just south of the sheep field. More customers for us now, he laughed, because we trust other people with our lives before we trust ourselves. At night we drink the fear away, which is to say, we drink it behind the light and hurry home in its shadow while fluorescent headlights yellow our skin to sickness. The glow before the end. But the moon is safe. The heath. The birds taking flight over fallow fields at dusk. The breath where there is none. We look up and wet that moon with our own tongue. These are our final days on the killing ground. We will each be alone, in time.

Natalie Eleanor Patterson is a half-Cuban femme lesbian poet 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, and Collision. 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, an independent editor, and a reader for One Magazine.  

A Song for Natalie