Patricia Nelson

Patricia Nelson has worked with the “Activist” poets in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has a new book, Monster Monologues, forthcoming from Fernwood Press in 2024.

Minotaur in the Maze

I do not love my prison.
Someone bent the air here.
Deception resounds everywhere,
like crickets scraping in the dark.

My wonder twitches like a yellow star
caught in dry and rattling leaves.
I am twisting toward a way. A door
that touches the clear, unstarved sky.

Where are those simple, spacious hungers
in which even monsters ought to live?

Sleeping Beauty’s Steps

How bright her footprints
lay upon the dust. A glint
of beauty and its absence.

How he wished to gather them.
To own the shape of her walking.
To know what her path wanted from her.

As if truth were a stillness
anyone might pass through
without harm.

As if any difficulty in it
moved in time with beauty.