Patricia J McLean

I think it could be a night like that night in August
just before Utopia got a new wall to replace the broken
falling down, rotten wood wall

Or before the night like that night, or another sort of night altogether
when the broccoli dies of neglect, tomatoes are so heavy vines break
the garden is going to seed anyway so what difference will it make

or maybe it will be the night before or the day before
I will wait for a few more minutes before I leave
and I will still be blocks away

there will be a rumble, a series of popping noises, a column of smoke

Or I could leave earlier and I could be inside at a table already eating
The food is so good there, I could be lifting a glass of wine to my lips
tasting the warmth, smelling summer in it

I could be folded up in blue space and disappear
I could be at the center folded up, disappeared
A fine red mist

I think before I wake up, before
I am all the way awake, that tonight will be
the night before when everything is on the eve of happening

I can sleep, it is the night before, the day before
I can make it always be the day before
if I don’t wake up

Patricia J McLean lives in Bend, Oregon. Her work has appeared in various publications including Windfall, The Lake, Panache, and Trillium. She and her spouse, Duane Poncy, have collaborated on three novels, Degrees of Freedom (2025), Ghosts of Saint-Pierre (2022), and Bartlett House (2007), and are working on their fourth novel. They established Rainy Nights Press in 2003, editing and publishing Raising Our Voices, an honored anthology introduced by Ursula K. Le Guin and Judith Barrington. The press published Navigation by Brittney Corrigan, Red Dust Rising by Marilyn Johnston, Like the Sun in Storm by Ralph Salisbury, and Eye of the Moon by Australian author Shelly Davidow. Beginning in 2012, they published Elohi Gadugi Journal, an online magazine of poetry, short stories, and non-fiction. They co-hosted the popular poetry series Readings at Milepost 5 (Portland, OR) for five years.
Patricia’s website is poncy-mclean.net

This poem appears in Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age — Summer 2025, published by The Chaos Section Poetry Project. We’ll be featuring each poem from the collection individually in the weeks ahead. You can read the full collection or download a free PDF of the chapbook here.