MY AMAZING INVESTMENT

by Pat Davis

I think they are sheep at first
but they’re corpses
wrapped and tied in white shrouds.

I wish they were low clouds
laid out in a row

but they’re my purchases,
femur, tibia, wrist
tied up for delivery.

I bought the rubble,
the bulldozers, too.

Israel lets in chips 
and Coke.

Children are dying of hunger.
Children are dying of cold.

Our papers blame the wind.
Blame the rain. 
Aid is blocked, the doctors

forced out.
By the toe-end of a corpse 
as long as my forearm 

is a puddle of muddy water in which a star
was lost

Patricia Davis’ poems appear in Smartish Pace, Image, Southern Humanities Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and other journals. Also a playwright, she earned her MFA from American University. She is translations editor for the literary journal Poet Lore and lives in the Washington, DC area, where she works in human rights advocacy.

D&D IN 2020

by Patricia Davis

On the one hand we’ve got Phandalin

a fantasy mining town besieged by dragons.

We are trying to learn the rules at the dining room table—

attributes, quests, etc. Then we move on

to real life, sitting in front of the fire,

exploring the properties of air on sparks.

Then Anna goes to bed

and I check Twitter for #MartialLaw

just like every night for the past two

months.  Half of America

(or a tenth of America and an industrious

factory of Russian bots) clamor for their rights

to be doused.  Choose your adventure.

They implore the president to JUST DO IT

Do Martial Law.  Save the Republic.

The only real thing is the fire

crackling on dry logs,

my daughter stretched out

with our remaining cat,

telling me the plot of her story—

how can four teenagers escape after creating

a distraction? One a light wielder, one a wielder

of shadows, one a wielder of time, one of frost

and a mindreader and telekinetic.

I tell her how powerful they are.

Of course they can rescue the captured one.

Of course they can escape.   

Patricia Davis’ poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, The New Verse News, Smartish Pace, Third Coast, The Atlanta Review, Salt Hill, Crab Creek Review, and other journals and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has an MFA from American University, where she was a Lannan Fellow. She is currently translations editor for Poet Lore.  

PENNED IN

by Patricia Davis

"Back to the Grind" by Pia Guerra at The Nib.

A thing half wild
carries a menace
             more complete than
the wild thing itself.
Farmers in Canada
               know this. They imported European wild boars
when the market for the boar meat
was good, several decades
             ago. The wild boars—
a number of
them—escaped
            and have since
mated with pigs.
Pigs are bred for bulk
            and have many more litters
and many more piglets per litter
than boars. Now, roaming northern
            and western Canada,
are colonies of pig-boars, spotted,
like domestic pigs
            and six hundred plus
pounds, with bristles
            and tusks.
To survive the winter, when temperatures
fall to 60 below,
           they make snow
burrows and line them with cattails
they've cut with their teeth.
           Pigloos, they’re called.
Porcine prodigies, they root
           through cultivated fields
like small backhoes.
They eat all that fits in their mouths:
           barley, wheat, small reptiles
and mammals.  They are spreading
           across the border into Montana,
North Dakota, hooved
Sasqueals whose habits have been
           only recently discovered.
This is all true.
There are stranger things than
           the odd killer pandemic.
Pigs, intended for slaughter, escape, mate
           with hirsute strangers from the woods,
build nests of soft weeds
that steam in winter from the heat
          so well made they are; pigs
give it all up—the feeding hour,
the predictable grain
         for freedom.
To die at the right time, not at the hand
of greed; not for the market.
Consider this: maybe
the fence is weak
          and our future is something
other than this, this
          waiting.

Patricia Davis has published poetry in Poet Lore, the Atlanta Review, Smartish Pace, Third Coast, and other journals. She works as a human rights advocate in Washington, DC.

JANUARY POEM

by Patricia Davis

When fascism comes
it will come with two

children, a dog,
tell warm, personal stories,
call us Ladies and

Gentlemen, have a
catch in its throat.

When fascism comes
it will raid
the houses of sleeping

children, use stun
grenades, tasers.

When fascism comes
it will seize filmmakers’
work at the border.

When fascism comes
it will study our e-mails.

When fascism comes
the potential hostile
intent of a child

will be reason to call in
a drone strike.

When fascism comes
there will be no lawyer,
no sentence, only

the bars, the dark.
When fascism comes

it will jail exclusively
those who have
spoken the truth.

When fascism comes
it will rise from the ash

of oppression.  On the wall
will hang the Nobel
Peace Prize.


Patricia Davis’ poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Salt Hill, Spoon River Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Quiddity, Adrienne Rich: A Tribute Anthology, Tar River Poetry, and Smartish Pace, which named her a finalist for the Beullah Rose Poetry Prize.   Her translations of Cuban poetry have been published or are forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol and the New Laurel Review.