Three Poems
by Christine Potter
Sunday Night, Holiday Weekend
Maybe it’s too warm to snow but the air’s dense with longing. Dusk before three, a sense of something turning. Who knows what that is? On the wet street by my house, traffic picking up, heading for the bridge across the Hudson. I think of the sweetness inside cars going home after a long weekend, after the hug goodbye, the last wave, the seat belts fastened: Oh my God, your father! Free speech at last. The leftovers doled out or used up clean. The things families say to each other. Long lines of turn signals on the Thruway, ready to merge—mirrors, chrome, and… escape achieved! Sigh. Heading home.
Basement Picture
Everything upstairs was boring as linoleum and wallpaper: long, polite adult conversations in which only adults spoke bumped along like freight trains. Early spring, the groan of windows opening. Dusty screens. The grandmotherly, bland encouragement of chicken fricassee—that smell. My father away, photographing someone’s fancy wedding. So no arguments. Downstairs, in one-lightbulb gloom, I scuffed last year’s white sneakers around the washing machine, dirt- dim windows above me, lawn level. And The Basement Picture, almost lost in shadow, on its side, behind the furnace. Made of tin. Tall as my waist. Its elaborate frame missing; Dad had taken that for the reproduction he’d bought of a Renoir girl smiling vaguely in her pink and purple garden—upstairs. The Basement Picture was gray and brown: The Crucifixion, Calvary in dust and mud. Even the blood was muted. Left by our house’s last family. Not the sort of thing we’d put on our walls. Even if you were careful, its tin thundered when you moved it. I pitied it, was deeply afraid of it, needed to look anyway. Often. Christ’s eyes, the eyes of the thieves on both sides of Him, the sepia sky. (It would have hurt. Hurt!) Dark, dark as basement air. Someone turned on water in the kitchen. Dad would be home for dinner. I couldn’t ask about Calvary. There’d be jokes about nuns and superstition. Dismal tin trembled in my fingers. Rumbled as I slid it back.
Monster Movie
The man I call my brother was orphaned in high school, so my family fostered him because he was my sister and my Marx- Brothers-watching, ironic-fedora-wearing, guitar-carrying, long-haired friend. Fixated also on Lon Cheney, Sr., he baby-powdered his face for my father’s noisy, hand-wound 16 mm movie camera, raising stretched-out fingers beside his chin, popping his eyes wide: the tragic Phantom of Something who smelled like a nursery: campy, not sad. We weren’t really sad. We lived in the cluttered stage set of my parents’ marriage—an old house with too much broken furniture in it— but they picked a path through for him, and he really is my brother, still. The scene I remember him in was The Monster Howls: lonely, pale as the black and white 1920’s, and silent. My mother found it adorable, but I never believe anyone is just acting. People tell me Don’t cry, it’s only a movie. They’re wrong. Each day we wake up deciding what’s real. The rest we have to fake: the click of antique sprockets, the man of a million faces.
Christine Potter is the poetry editor of Eclectica magazine. She has poetry published there, and in Rattle, ONE ART, Grain, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and Glimpse. Her most recent collection of poems is Unforgetting (Kelsay Books) and her time traveling YA novels, The Bean Books, are on Evernight Teen. Christine lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and kitty, in a very old house.