“O Grief” by Patty Paine

231 Replies
grief & other animals October 31, 2013

Every day the white-hot
burn of you.

Grief, intransigent
bastard you, ants marching

my counters, every day I kill
you, every day you march again.

I could get used to you,
the extravagant pain of you,

the slack jawed
dead at the end

of a needle, you.
But tonight, I’ll walk into you,

past Trick-or-Treaters,
with their open mouthed

bags of want, their hastily sewn
illusions. Past them,

and into you, always
into you.

–Patty Paine,
Grief & Other Animals
(Accents Publishing)

patty paine for grief launchPatty Paine is the author of The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing), 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) and The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf (Berkshire). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird, The Louisville Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and other publications. She is the founding editor ofDiode Poetry Journal, and Diode Editions, and is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar where she teaches writing and literature, and is interim director of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

231 thoughts on ““O Grief” by Patty Paine”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *