Pat Hanahoe-Dosch
Of Zucchini and Dark Hordes
like a crowd’s breath.
The child knows nothing
about the zucchini
once attached to a vine,
rising from loam and beetles,
surrounded by yellow blossoms,
growing into long, green tunnels of fruit and seeds.
The baker hands the child a universe in a slice.
As she bites into the sugar, flour, eggs
and other dreams the zucchini embraced,
the child is unsure
she will actually like its stars, but the first bite swirls
her down the street and into a park
with asphalt walkways that rise and fall
with currents below the city
in the black tunnels that feed upon
night sweats and basement terrors,
shadows behind a furnace. Somewhere
a baker is looking for walnuts that have rolled
through cracks in the floor,
somewhere a child is licking chocolate
frosting from the edge of a knife,
and somewhere something is waiting
to rise and procreate
in the dark swirls
between a red dwarf and a child’s delight
in chocolate zucchini bread.
In Times Square
shadows trip between flashing signs, occasionally pausing,
then turn and dance
in another direction.
Hunger rises in its long garrote,
the leash that loops around subway tunnels,
asphalt, the park with no trees, leaves blown from elsewhere,
furnaces, closets stuffed with mismatched gloves and torn coats,
walnuts, children,
bakers and blossoms of virus
swirling between light bulbs and air vents.
Pandemic, 2020
water and wind in the darkness.
She burned, but rain could not extinguish her.
Rain was soft on her bones at first.
Stars and moonlight were frost.
Air singed her throat.
The voices of patients in the rooms,
hail on a tin roof.
Her bones creaked,
a chestnut tree covered
in blight
bending under the weight of gale force wind.
This was living after death,
after burying this one person too many.
She was a felled log covered in termites,
swarmed by torrential rain.
She was
lightning
with nowhere to strike,
chasing voices of the dead,
thunder in a crevasse of scratched and chipped night,
a black crepe draped moon.
Pat Hanahoe-Dosch’s poems have been published in The Paterson Literary Review, Rattle, The Atticus Review, Confrontation, Conjunctions, Rust + Moth, American Literary Review, among many others. Her books of poems The Wrack Line and Fleeing Back can be found on Amazon.com or the FutureCycle Press website, futurecyle.org. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona and currently teaches writing and literature at a community college in PA. // Short stories of hers have been published in The Peacock Journal, In Posse Review, Sisyphus, Manzano Mountain Review, and The Schuylkill Valley Journal. One of her stories was nominated for the Best of the Net award, 2018. Her nonfiction articles have appeared in Travel Belles, On a Junket, and Wholistic Living News. // You can follow her on twitter at @PHanahoeDosch, or Instagram @Hanahoedosch.