Patricia Gray was born in DC, but grew up in Virginia, and didn’t return to live in historic Capitol Hill until 1987, four years after getting an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia.
Her most recent publications include three poems in The Mid-Atlantic Review and three others in The Raven’s Perch. She has won several Artist Fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and was a finalist for the 55th Millennium Writing Award in poetry. Gray formerly directed the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. She occasionally teaches workshops for The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
Sandra Beasley is the curator of “Poetic Hill,” a resident of Southwest, and the author of four poetry collections. If you live in D.C. and you’re interested in being featured, you can reach her at [email protected] for questions and submissions (1-5 poems).
Everyday Hazards
Sometimes when you find beauty,
it feels like you’ve come
in from the cold,
warm and grateful that wonder
startled you back into life.
And now, almost dancing, you show
a friend the phone photo
of the new painting you love—
and he nods. “Ho-hum.”
So you tell your sister about
the gorgeous movie that brought you
to tears—the one that stayed with you
for days, and she says, “Didn’t like it.”
Sometimes when you come to beauty,
it enters the blood stream to your heart—
the heart you hold in a handkerchief and
and carefully unfold to another,
but what remains is the beautiful thing
that burned through the distance
between you and it, having cut into your
evening like a handsome partner
at the cotillion, asking to take you home.
