Slippery Side of the Moon

                                 Lynne Potts

 

The moon poked a hole in the curtain to stain

our living  room floor with its baffling white,

 

we, with our blurred eyes from too much

watching saw the moon as if it had no expression.

 

I wanted to slide it off the floor, feeling like nothing

ever happened. But see, it’s still there.

 

You remember in films what happens when Roman

emperors leave—their chariots sliding off the screen?

 

You said that’s how happening is. That’s how you

saw it, tossing our blankets down the stairwell.

 

I said history has holes like those on the moon’s

other side, like pocks on the cobbled Appian Way.

 

You said flipping the switch will stop the projector,

thinking we would watch the rest together.

 

We’d been paused too long, I thought, like waiting for

a story to end or how we drift to sleep in the living room.

 

All the while the moon kept its poker face in place—

no slipping, though time kept rolling its cogs and wheels.

 

I took my blanket to the corner of the living room alone;

then I could see how the moon had moved a little bit.

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Lynne Potts's first book, Porthole View, won the 2012 National Poetry Review Press poetry prize. Two more poetry collections are forthcoming in 2017– a second with National Poetry Review and one with Glass Lyre Press.

 

Lynne's work has appeared in Paris Review, American Literary Review, American Letters and Commentary, Meridian, Guernica, American Letters and Commentary, Southern Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, California Quarterly and many others. Her work has received special recognition from Colorado Review, New Issues Press, Merick Press, Alice James Press, and Ohio State Press in addition to a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, VCCA and Ragdale.

Lynne lives in New York and Boston, and is Poetry Editor of AGNI at Boston University.

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