.                                 for Susan

Early fall, and along each branch
leaves are drawn against the coming rain.
My blind son feels heaviness
gathering in the sky, can taste the gray
swollen clouds. Later, he will send me
a bottle of wine he calls rain.
I taste currant, and earth,
and the something I can’t name is his
rain. But it’s not
so late yet, and my son is still
a smallness I can hold
to my breast.
It is fall, and I’m still grasping
his hand as we hurry home.
It will be years before he recalls this day,
how when the rain came I opened
my coat and lifted him to me.
As lightning arced overhead
he felt my trembling along his body.
It was then he could see
how much his life filled me with fear.

–Patty Paine,
The Sounding Machine
Accents Publishing

Previous posts about The Sounding Machine and Patty Paine:

• “Half-Korean”
• “My Mother”
• Patty Paine’s a Literary Sleuth (Accents Update 02/13/14)
• 2014 Poetry Chapbook Contest
• “Vantage”

Patty Paine is the author of Feral (Imaginary Friend Press), Elegy & Collapse (Finishing Line Press), and co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Garnet Publishing & Ithaca Press). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts, The Atlanta Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and many other publications. She is the founding editor of Diode Poetry Journal, and is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar where she teaches writing and literature, and is assistant director of Liberal Arts & Sciences.