by Emily Patterson

From below the branches it’s easy to mistake a ripe leaf for a Red Haven, and the rapid rain that drives us under shallow eaves might be misconstrued as urgency, but nothing is urgent here: not the cattails blowzy by the pond; not my daughter’s short steps through sodden rows of unmown clover; not the sunny fuzz of each fruit’s underside, flesh that would be rosy if not for its own shadow. At home on the kitchen table, we tally our bounty: precisely forty peaches and not one ready, to my daughter’s dismay. Impatience, for all its false rush, has been my own longtime companion, and so I try not to shoo her grasping hands. How slowly I am learning to love: not only what takes time, but the time it takes.

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Emily Patterson (she/her) is the author of The Birth of Undoing (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025), as well as three chapbooks. Her work is published or forthcoming in North American Review, CALYX, Christian Century, The Penn Review, Literary Mama, NELLE, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. Emily is a curriculum designer for Highlights for Children and lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio. See emilypattersonpoet.com.

by Emily Patterson

Upstairs in the stone church
at night, we gather once each month,
and not to pray. At the center

of the table, tiny cupcakes cluster
like an offering: light pink icing,
soft blue sugar, left untouched.

Instead, a circle of stories unfolds,
each of us reciting her chapter, so often
unchanged month after month

after month. We are a chorus of grief
in metal folding chairs; we are a collective
hush: here for the holiness

of being heard, for the echoes bearing
into the emptiness like a cathedral
of children, singing.

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Emily Patterson is the author of So Much Tending Remains (2022) and To Bend and Braid (2023). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Spiritual Literature and appears in Sweet Lit, Rust & Moth, The Shore, tiny wren, Mom Egg Review, and elsewhere. She received her B.A. in English from Ohio Wesleyan University and her M.A. in Education from Ohio State University. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio.

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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.

by Emily Patterson

The river’s edge teems with leafy
groundcover, tiny forest
that steals the sound from our steps.

In its lushness, you stumble silently
in search of stems that glow. Soon
you turn toward me again, petals

starring your chin, stems in your hand
reduced to their centers—and really,
I can understand why you’d want

to consume their color, to get close
to that wild beauty, to know it
in a whole-bodied way. Later

when you lie on the grass, twigs
catching in your curls, I do the same:
watching you watch the branches

etch a web against the pale sky. At least,
this is what I think you see, but perhaps
it’s pinecones, or the wind, or something

unknowable in your growing mind.
In my own mind I wonder how we
got here, how once my body carried

yours, but now your wonder
enfolds us both, opens me up each
morning like a field feasting on light.

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Emily Patterson is the author of So Much Tending Remains (Kelsay Books, 2022). She 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. Emily’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appears in Rust and Moth, Minerva Rising Press, Sheila-Na-Gig, The Sunlight Press, Mom Egg Review, Literary Mama, and elsewhere.