by Kyle Potvin

This winter I need the bite of garlic.
Prepare dish after dish.

Sizzling shrimp with garlic (3 cloves, minced)
Garlic-butter steak (5 cloves, finely chopped)
Chicken curry (4 cloves, crushed)

Three of our mothers lost in as many months.

Requiem aeternam
Allium sativum

I swirl a raw clove around my mouth.
Smooth as a pebble
one should not swallow.

A pungency stays with my breath.

Garlic is pollinated by bees, moths and butterflies.
It does not have a mother.

Friends, we are the bees.

______________________________________________________________________

Kyle Potvin’s debut full-length poetry collection is Loosen (Hobblebush Books, 2021). Her chapbook, Sound Travels on Water, won the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, Ecotone, SWWIM Every Day, The New York Times, and others. She is a peer reviewer for Whale Road Review.

by Kyle Potvin

Brave the tundra, where species cling to life.
Brave infusions that chemical a vein.

Brave a city blackout with its window-shatter,
and lightning igniting a forest away.

Brave scoldings and finger-pointing.
Voices louder than yours.

Brave your sad past, your afraid past.
All that is to come.

Brave the horizon of gray.
Brave the whimper of years.

Brave these trees, first maple, then oak,
losing their familiars, one by one.

Breathe again and again.
Brave again.

*This poem was a semi-finalist in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kyle Potvin’s chapbook, Sound Travels on Water, won the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. She is a two-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Whale Road Review, Tar River Poetry, Ecotone, The New York Times, and others. Her poetry collection, Loosen, is coming from Hobblebush Books in January 2021. Kyle lives in southern New Hampshire.

by Kyle Potvin

Pink mucket, wartyback, catspaw.
We are all endangered:

Your mother, mine, a young traveler
who never makes it home.

Just check your phone,
filter feeder of grief.

Ming, a bivalve mollusk,
lived 500 years.

I weep
for his longevity.

This earth is ringed
tight as a mussel.

Forgive me: I have been thinking
of death nearly since birth.

I am soft-bellied.
Take me first.

Don’t leave me burrowed.
Gasping for air.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kyle Potvin’s chapbook, Sound Travels on Water (Finishing Line Press, 2012), won the 2014 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. She is a two-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Tar River Poetry, Ecotone, The New York Times, and others. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Loosen, is coming from Hobblebush Books in September 2020. Kyle lives in Southern New Hampshire.

by Kyle Potvin

I have survived the darts of winter icing my face

and scrubbed mud from the carpet all spring.

I have rejoiced at the sky turned bowl-like and blue

and studied the family of fox living beneath our forsythia.

And yet you do not appear, as you always do,

your purple palms upraised.

The spectacle of fireworks does not entice you,

nor the young blueberries about to burst

from their tight pods.

The tall stalks swish a strange summons,

first casual, then insistent. Still,

you do not come.

I can't explain this sadness.

All I know is that since I came to this place,

I have relied on you to open, so that each July,

I can place your stems in the guest room

for my mother, who, ill and slowing,

has yet to tell me if she will arrive.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kyle Potvin’s chapbook, Sound Travels on Water (Finishing Line Press), won the 2014 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. She is a two-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, The New York Times, Measure, JAMA, and others. She is an advisor to Frost Farm Poetry in Derry, NH, and helps produce the New Hampshire Poetry Festival. Kyle lives with her family in Southern New Hampshire.