Dawn Potter

Death, by which I mean the sudden death
of snuff bottles and weeping willow trees,

“Yo, Shakespeare,” said my friend Angela. “Write about unrequited love, false promises, fake IDs, blown head gaskets, radio late at night, sex with the same man after twenty-five years… you know.”

1. Unrequited Love

All of my loves have been unrequited, for I consistently fall in love with men who are less excited about loving me than I am about loving them. Of course, the accuracy of this claim depends on how one defines love—a word that, in my case, has perpetually adolescent overtones and that, when mixed with graying hair and housework, creates a kind of melancholy oldies-station uproar—those oldies that I can’t believe are old, those songs with the embarrassing end rhymes and predictable guitar sobs that I know I ought to despise but that keep making my eyes prickle and my throat swell shut.

I was in my early teens when I met, for the first time, a book that didn’t like me.

Like a flour smudge on an old blue apron,

A lunchtime moon thumbprints the sun-plowed,

Five o’clock, first week of daylight savings.

Sunshine doggedly pursues night.