‘Holly Blood Stains Our Palms’, ‘Down the Drain’, ‘The Night Sky Is A Grave’ & ‘The Crane and The Flower’

Donald Patten is an artist and cartoonist from Belfast, Maine. He produces oil paintings, illustrations, ceramic pieces and graphic novels. His art has been exhibited in galleries across Maine. His online portfolio is donaldlpatten.newgrounds.com/art

holly blood stains our palms

speak to me of dollhouse days from the theater of your mind.

conversation blooms and beads like blood from our lips

and our hands, pressed and split with letter openers and holly thorns to reveal

the sweet and tender fruits of our fate lines-

addressed to each other, we read off recountings:

you, the past, and

i, the future.

we speak and manage through

the slow drip of death, the muddles of bygones,

and whisper poetry composed for ourselves from the rawest fibers our lips can spin-

frequently, we lose the plot, and the blood that traces our palms flows

quicker to the earth;

the bitter juice of the holly berry,

the insides of our minds and our hands come to

drip and drop between us,

to color the earth red long after we are gone.

what sort of abstract art is this, what meaning does it have but to bind us?

when we press our bleeding palms together

and seal our brief exchange with an oath:

“shake on it my good man,

promise it won’t be easily forgotten,

the blood we’ve spilt here today.”

i hope the sweet and bitter aftertaste of memory, like berry juice

will taint your tongue and stain your hand,

so you can recall our agreement

when our conversations are mere scars on the palm.

and though in retrospect, you may think the taste too bitter, or the marks too plain and faded,

i pray you will know that i look upon the scars as words

or fate lines,

dissecting fond meanings in each sweet phrase we spilled.

Down the Drain

I cried in the shower

over the 

preemptive loss of time.

My tears swirled blissfully

down to oblivion

and when I was done

It seemed as though

my sadness

had never existed at all.

The Night Sky is a Grave

She’s on the lawn, irreparable, watching the moon slide down her cheeks like tears, awake at an unholy hour, inside her family grieves, inside she is part of a whole, a mourning mass, made unspecial in her sorrow, out here, under the falling stars, she is singular in the night sky like a cold and dark planet or an exploding celestial body, out here, she is her own ever-expanding, ever-weeping universe.

She sits on the lawn, and she cries.

The Crane and The Flower

you sat down at the table

and looked at the potential until you saw me

in the blank and the paper cuts.

like the tender mother shapes the child, you took my corners 

and folded them into wings.

when you kissed my forehead i learned to soar-

you have given me the gift of flight.

your own rustling hands were themselves still semi-formed,

for you had hardly bloomed yourself, with

paper petals so raw and new that

it seemed unfair to burden them with another life- 

yet you cradled me still,

took me on willingly: 

the greatest sacrifice a person has made for me.

and now you are carried,

a paper flower on a western breeze,

spinning and circling back to me.

yet if you did not return,

if your days weighed you down or your petals grew too thin-

then the wings you gifted me will always

blow me back to your waiting smile;

the little paper crane forever drawn back to

the fingers of its creator.

Quinn Marley Garcia is a writer and part-time cowboy. She was the first youth playwright to have a piece virtually performed at the Little Fish Theater in LA, and has been published in multiple literary magazines.