Unsheltered, or News of the Broken World

                                           by Emily Patterson

 
arrives on our front porch in the image of
a woman, pregnant, body and clothes aglow
 
against the maternity center blasted by bombs,
her child sheltered by her body, her body
 
unsheltered, her world a shell, shelled.
 
My own daughter wakes up fevered, vomits
milk and mucus beneath the kitchen table,
 
and so I keep her home, keep her close,
sick and safe as she sleeps outside my body,
 
inside these unbruised walls. Hours later,
 
awake and alight at the window, we watch
the stillness of our neighbors’ houses,
 
clustered and intact; weak sunlight in a sky
absent of any threat—this earth untouched
 
by ashes and audacious enough to bloom.


* * * * *

Emily Patterson is the author of So Much Tending Remains (Kelsay Books, 2022), a collection of poems chronicling the first year of motherhood. Her second chapbook, To Bend and Braid, is forthcoming this summer. Emily received her B.A. in English from Ohio Wesleyan University, where she was awarded the Marie Drennan Prize for Poetry, and her M.A. in Education from The Ohio State University. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is published or forthcoming in Rust + Moth, SWWIM, Mom Egg Review, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere.