“Edge” by Patty Paine

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The Sounding MachineA woman touches her stomach,
each scar mouths its terrible storyinto her fingers. Midnight
and her daughter is in the pool
being held in the trembling

arms of a boy. Swooping bats sound
out the bodies. One. No, two. Details

that will carry across years: his wet breath
on her sun sore neck, the unwhole
moon, crisp kiss

of air on her face, her heart
pounding, pounding,

on the window, her mother’s
fists. In the cave of dark
water bodies fly apart, too soon

the mother says, too soon
for men and their bladed hands.

–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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