Dayna Patterson

Pied Beauty Redux

When I say God, maybe I mean a being
in between. A sky of couple-color. My God-thought
a too-tight swimsuit, an extra small
rubber band I’ve stretched.        Am stretching. If I’m to hold this relic
in my soul, I want it
Infinity-Big. Room for billions of arms,
hearts, backbones,
                                      buttocks, livers,
legs, torsos,
                            metatarsals, penises,
pancreases, breasts,
breaths. All the spinal cords & scapulas & hymens & thyroids & sacra.
Patella, nerve,
                                          node. Clavicle,
mandible, pharynx,
larynx. Ribcage splayed with lungs at peak load. Fecund
& fatherfull. Monstrous
                          & motherous.

In a Hindu creation tale, an altar where I kneel:
Brahma split one Self— herself     and     himself—
mating themselves to birth
all of it:                Skewbald stars.
              Marled dark.                     Brinded cows.
Trout.                  Chestnut falls.                  Finches’ wings.
Beaches spackled with sequin-sand.
Landscape quilted.          Gear & tackle & trim.   God as adazzle
and dim, a dappled thing, fluid
like water, like wind.                  Like this marbled world. God as snail
trailing galaxies, home-hauling.            God as tree: bloom-bright-
breeze-pollinating.                         They
parent-forth in coupled beauty, two hemispheres
fused in One Wisdom:
                            Praise them.

---

God the Mother Speaks of Matriphagy

I have set before you likenesses

desert spider    crab spider       lace-weaver

the mother drums her web: I am here I am here I am
or the mother fills with food-eggs too big to leave her body
or the mother liquifies and her clutch eats her alive

this I will do for you        have done     am doing     will do

faster, those young     quick to molt, to bulk and prey
less likely to cannibalize siblings

what is milk but a way to mother-eat,
draining even her bones     in my belly basket,
what will sustain you      in my wineskins,

enough to fill your hollows

beloved spiderlings, if you find yourselves
wild with hunger, born to barren, I will feed you
my body’s bread    my body’s flood

of white fire       of good burn

​go on     take, swallow, & devour me

---

God the Mother Speaks of Agency

Sometimes, children, you choose inuksuit.
White flags. A firepit and guitar pick.

You nurse a baby bat with a syringe,
drip apple juice on its pink tongue.

Other times you choose elephant tusks,
abandon the grey husk and hulking bones.

You are the tops I set spinning, knowing
you down to your cells, knowing about ledges,

centripetal force, friction.
All-knowing is not foreknowing.

I halve that apple, dig out with my knife’s point
arsenic seeds.

You’ve painted my friend, Satan, globe-trotter,
with a palette of black and smoke. Why

do you love the taste of blame, little
dodgers, little finger pointers.

You are the tops I spin, knowing every
groove in the grain.

Once in a while, you choose a cup of sun.
An ounce of soap. A thread of good.

Your agency is the leash I live by.
Sometimes, I gnaw at my restraint.

​Sometimes, I sew my eyes shut.
​

--
Dayna Patterson is the author of Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). Her creative work has appeared recently in Carolina Quarterly, Duende, EcoTheo, and Gulf Coast. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre and a co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. She was a co-winner of the 2019 #DignityNotDetention Poetry Prize judged by Ilya Kaminsky. daynapatterson.com