disaster movie by Lee Patterson

you come over dressed as weather: your hair the color of cumulonimbus, your breath an indian summer. you find me in the tub, scrubbing off parts of yesterday that refused to leave with it. we are living in a disaster movie, but it’s not something we talk about: not the asteroid cascading toward earth; not the superstorm in the middle of the atlantic, threatening to barrel into the northeast shoreline. the birds have flown west in an attempt to escape the superstorm. what they don’t know is that you can’t outfly an asteroid. we can hear them through the bathroom walls, out in the yard. they sound excited in a first date kind of way. you curtsy into the bathtub with me. a small wave of bathwater crashes against my neck. an earthquake shutters out of your hips & a crack runs down the side of the porcelain tub. a thunderstorm emits from your hair. you cough thunder. a piece of hail chips my front tooth, but I don’t complain. I wouldn’t know how if I wanted to.

Lee Patterson‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Ethel Zine, The Airgonaut, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Flash Flood, among others. His chappook, I get sad, is forthcoming from Ethel Zine in late 2019.

Photo by Victor Rodriguez