✨ Uninhabited

Dark as ocean...

Uninhabited

That January we ate ramen, broth sharp
as vinegar. Sipped the sizzling disappointment

while snow cascaded from the second floor
until our city grew unrecognizable. By April

love was a chore, in service of something
that wouldn’t come. Spring, razor-hot July

into August—another autumn, uninhabited.
I dreamt of gardens to rip bare. I dreamt

of my childhood home, stripped of its topsoil,
three acres of mud where we planted grass

every year. In November we drove south
to the caverns of Kentucky, where the guide

clicked off her lantern, said to wave
our hands before our faces, see nothing.

Dark as ocean, blank as the black
at the center of my body—

that small cave I carried everywhere,
year into year, home to none.

—Emily Patterson

From The Birth of Undoing, Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, © Copyright 2025. Used by permission of the poet. Photo by Sasha Matic, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.