Summer, 2024
There are some photos you smell: mud,
wet plaster, white, shopping-mall-looking
churches crunched like recycling. (Some
kind of miracle Vacation Bible School was
not in session.) But all that passed us by.
We got only a tarnished sky, clouds going
dark, racing, airliner-high. The distant
hurricane’s gone ragged against our car
on this pier where soldiers shipped out
in World War II. It’s a line of benches for
fishing now. The wind’s like Florida, not
New York; the Hudson’s white-capped,
an American flag’s grommets chiming on
its pole. Today’s too hot and moody for
walking. But elsewhere’s way worse. And
then there’s the future, about which no
one seems optimistic. Maybe there’s a
sullen beauty in tornadoes: dust-gray, like
wasps’ nests. Spoons stirring us up. But
not here. Not today. Elsewhere, not now.
—
Christine Potter is the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine. Her poems have been curated in many literary publications: Rattle, Grain, ONE ART, Does It Have Pockets, Tar River Poetry, The McNeese Review, and Consequence. Her time-traveling young adult novels, The Bean Books, are published by Evernight Teen and her latest collection of poetry, Unforgetting, is on Kelsay Books.
