Dawn Potter: Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know What Love Is
I think back to those nights in Buck Lane, the melodramas of sex and desire, the intense affections but also the cruelties … the ruthlessness of self-absorption.
Dawn Potter: Why, as the evening steps forward,
as the late noise of traffic, of shrill birdsong,
dies away, do I always recall
those brief summers, when the old folks
reclined in the grass on the hill
Dawn Potter: To the Republic
Those last moments, before the sun drops behind the hills,
you linger, not yet yourself—no darkness, no stars—
still waiting, waiting for the curtain to sigh shut
Dawn Potter: Home Burial
I pretend I am living in a faraway
city, somewhere in Europe, where doves
coo in the bell towers and a woman in
heels click-clicks over the cobblestones,
walking, walking late into the night.
Dawn Potter: The Way We Live Now
a man solitary as a grieving
arrow types
a text to his daughter and
the text feathers into the ether
Dawn Potter: Piers Plowman
Who mutters the low notes, croons the old riversift,
water tumbling into stone and sand? Who trembles
the cows clustered in the thin shade of the high hill?
Dawn Potter: Ode to the Haverford Park Apartments
Stubbed-out cigarettes & the Ramones playing loud at 2 a.m. on a stereo
that the guy you’re with paid for by flipping burgers all summer & it
has the best speakers he wastes so much time telling you how great
these speakers are & you are annoyed you are like Take my clothes off
but you don’t say it out loud because christ isn’t it obvious
Dawn Potter: Play Clothes
How many summers
did that red and white sundress last?
It was my mother’s before it was mine
Dawn Potter: A Small Celebration of Baron Wormser and Teresa Carson
Lived-Time, Art-Time, and Friendship
Dawn Potter: Late April
Ghosts shimmered on the broken doorstep,
rising through dust to become my own new skin
Dawn Potter: Sleeping with the Cat
the bossiest boyfriend I have ever entertained,
crammed between my knees, purring himself into glory
Dawn Potter: Arcadia, 1939
warmth of bread baking, a cardinal alight in a branching
oak, white bed, linens floating in air, a table
laid in an arbor’s shade—
Carlene M. Gadapee: Accidental Hymn by Dawn Potter
Dawn’s speakers are the collective voice of the common person: she captures the hard-working, angry, sad, loving, celebratory voices of the Maine woods and coast, the hills of Appalachia, the house-bound and the homesick…
Dawn Potter: For David
The world is personal,
Dawn says. And what heart-scalded person
would think otherwise
