“Mother, Father, Child” by Patty Paine

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The Sounding Machine by Patty Paine

Her mother threw herself
down the sundeck stairs,
over and over
until bones flew
apart inside her body.

Her father slipped
into her room, told
how he dreams of nothing
but the pigeon he killed
when he was a child.
Every night he stands over
himself weeping and ashamed.

Next morning she slides open
her father’s chest and sees
a gleaming
row of wrenches,
each mouth gaping
wider and wider.

She palms the smallest
and can almost slip
her pinky between its steel lips.
The largest grips her
wrist. She twists
until it catches skin, bites
bone, until the cold
concrete sways beneath her
bare feet, and pain opens
her like a wing.

–Patty Paine,
The Sounding Machine
Accents Publishing

Patty PainePatty 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.

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