Emily Patterson

Uninhabited

That January we ate ramen, broth sharp
as vinegar. Sipped the sizzling disappointment

while snow cascaded from the second floor
until our city grew unrecognizable. By April

love was a chore, in service of something
that wouldn’t come. Spring, razor-hot July

into August—another autumn, uninhabited.
I dreamt of gardens to rip bare. I dreamt

of my childhood home, stripped of its topsoil,
three acres of mud where we planted grass

every year. In November we drove south
to the caverns of Kentucky, where the guide

clicked off her lantern, said to wave
our hands before our faces, see nothing.

Dark as ocean, blank as the black
at the center of my body—

that small cave I carried everywhere,
year into year, home to none.

Emily Patterson (Instagram: @emilypattersonpoet) is the author of So Much Tending Remains and To Bend and Braid. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Spiritual Literature. She was selected as a runner-up in the Sundress Publications Poetry Broadside Contest, and her work appears or is forthcoming in SWWIM Every Day, North American Review, Rust & Moth, CALYX, Mom Egg Review, Sheila-Na-Gig online, The Shore, and elsewhere. Emily holds a B.A. in English from Ohio Wesleyan University and an M.A. in Education from Ohio State University. She lives in Columbus, Ohio with her family and works as a curriculum designer.