By Brenda Joyce Patterson on September 16, 2021
Brenda Joyce Patterson: Four Poems
Selected by Alexis Rhone Fancher, Poetry Editor
Summer
everything
looks like something else:
a caladium’s broad leaf
glazed with late afternoon rain
is a slice of watermelon ruddy
and black-seeded ripe
*
Courtship
it was the first thing I noticed
your hand a sun at the hollow
of my back and its weight
I wanted to lie down for you
skin my own dark sun gleaming
wanted to lie down across you
the air around us a spark
before kindling instead I led you
a merry chase made you work
the furnace of desire led myself
into a circling of want working
the foundry of our bodies
incandescent I wanted
to lie down under you
until we both went molten
*
Tell Me About the Body
after “Truce” by Kevin Young
I can scarcely look at mine. It wallows
in itself full of heat and liquid and hunger
all fingers and mouth grabbing tasting
eager for the next whatever it loves
mirrors and all the preening to be done
sees its skin as miraculous a burnishment
of light sees itself a complexity
of cones and parabolas one curve
leading to another declares itself holy
*
Helix
black girl now woman
I am first
building block
born from the sun
skin a melanin
masterpiece
I am first
and last delta
its curve following
shoulder to hip
the loam of Eden
from my hair coils
the engine driving
atom to protein
to our base acid
I am first
answer to the making
of humankind
Photo credit: Mish (Eileen Murphy)
Author
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and TV talk show host. She writes a column, Writing Small, for DIY MFA, a Writers Digest best website for writers. She also hosts Writers Den, a Central Florida literary talk show. Past Writers Den guests have included Jennifer Givhan, Jamie Ford, Therese Ann Fowler, Wiley Cash, JoAnn Balingit, and Crystal Wilkinson. She is a past poetry mentee of AWP’s Writer to Writer Mentorship, Fall 2018. Her poetry and flash fiction appeared in Vayavya, Gravel Magazine, and Melancholy Hyperbole. Along with works by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Walker, her travel essay, "The Kindness of Strangers", appeared in Go Girl: The Black Woman's Guide to Travel and Adventure (Eighth Mountain Press, 1997).