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
Dawn Potter: Now that I’m old
now that I don’t have sex every night or carry two fat boys,
one on each hip, up small mountains,
I have to go to exercise class
Dawn Potter: Island Weather
headlights painting streaks of rain
on my pale window, and still
the torrent comes faster, faster—bluster, leak,
and squall.
Dawn Potter: Heat Wave
a squirrel is hurling insults, and beneath his screeches the cicadas
insist and sigh, insist and sigh, unmoved by his grandiloquent snit.
Dawn Potter: Mother to Son
Always with the video games when you’re sad,
as if the gunshots are manna, or music,
which isn’t to say I think you’re planning
to shoot up a grocery store—no, no
Dawn Potter| Nocturne: A Marriage
In the ancient night
the vines of summer choke
breath choke memory
blooms fatten and fall
Vox Populi 