“Merciless” by Patty Paine

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grief & other animals1.

Again, the pigeons arrive,
three months, and still expecting
a scribble of seed along the sill.
How not to hate their relentless
innuendo, their inexhaustible need
to return? The hand that feeds you
is no more. Take your stupid swagger,
your useless iridescence, alight
yourselves, be gone.

2.

The night you hit the black ice
of addiction, it came to me
razor clean. After, someone wailed
and keened and turned
beggar. Someone strung
beads of no, no, no. Someone
collapsed, and broke open,
while someone else murmured
over, over, over

–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.

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