Natalie Eleanor Patterson

OBLIGE
for Hannah

I didn’t hallucinate her face on every street corner
it was there in a haze of unruly cathexis

She always joked that the letters on her license plate
spelled out I Left Myself Behind

When I run back to Georgia I walk the little trail
in the forest by the house where I grew up

find the heads still spinning in their arboreal chambers
& me two thousand miles away still trying to be

untouched & learning that sometimes running to
& running from are the same damn thing in the end

sliced clean from eyes to tail a circling back
into the blood that familiar swarm

My mother calls this my breakdown gives her testimony
still damp from when it almost drowned

in the creek out back I’m honeywooded
there’s a gulf in the backyard that opens whenever it rains

Believe it or not I’m doing better can’t fuck
unless I’m drunk can’t sleep without the pills but still

I’m learning not to look at the bodies
in the branches that all bear my face

It’s easier when I remember just what bleeding is
something inside me that wants to get out