When my girl’s eyes begin to drift
Dayna Patterson
apart
I pinch the air thumb and finger
instead of speaking I trap the thinnest slice of nothing
sheet of light to sync her gazes into one,
to bring her eyes aligned
with mine
the body language we worked out together
less painful (she tells me)
than the words I used to say
(Your eyes are wandering)
her shrinking into herself as if I’d thrown
a box of tacks
Somehow me nipping the space between us hurts
less than a verbal reminder however gentle however
soft I make my voice approach her on tiptoe in plush socks or padding
soft as one of the wild rabbits
that lives in a neighbor’s blackberry thicket
word knives scalpels to such thin
tender skin we’ve tried patching remedies hours
of convergence / divergence / auto slide
where the blue square and the pink one
move together and apart on the computer screen’s
dark field and she in 3-D glasses must click the shapes
I cannot see I imagine a time when my gestures
won’t be enough
to bring her back to herself or pluck away the invisible
hurt the stings and scrapes I can’t bandage
I imagine a day when words
less soft may assail her those inch-long spines
she rabbiting straight towards them
Dayna Patterson is a former managing editor of Bellingham Review, the founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre, and the poetry editor for Exponent II Magazine. She is a co-editor (with Tyler Chadwick and Martin Pulido) of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry (Peculiar Pages, 2018). Her poetry has appeared recently in Hotel Amerika, So to Speak, Western Humanities Review, and Zone 3. Her work can be found at www.daynapatterson.com.