Cathedral

By Emily Patterson

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Upstairs in the stone church 
at night, we gather once each month, 
and not to pray. At the center

of the table, tiny cupcakes cluster 
like an offering: light pink icing,
soft blue sugar, left untouched. 

Instead, a circle of stories unfolds, 
each of us reciting her chapter, so often 
unchanged month after month 

after month. We are a chorus of grief 
in metal folding chairs; we are a collective 
hush: here for the holiness 

of being heard, for the echoes bearing 
into the emptiness like a cathedral 
of children, singing.

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Emily Patterson is the author of So Much Tending Remains (2022) and To Bend and Braid (2023). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Spiritual Literature and appears in Sweet Lit, Rust & Moth, The Shore, tiny wren, Mom Egg Review, and elsewhere. She received her B.A. in English from Ohio Wesleyan University and her M.A. in Education from Ohio State University. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio.

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