Benediction

—Christine Potter

I want this poem to feel like giving in to the

nap you’ve been fighting. Like the blue quilt

you’re about to yank up to your neck. For it to be

the show in the contemporary crafts museum

you went to at seventeen with your friends,

the one that encouraged you to climb inside

the art, some of which was covered in mirrors.

See, I want you to have some say-so about this

poem. I want it to be what you need it to be.

For it to mean something to you I could never

predict. Like how lucky you are. I want it

to be the drive home on a road where you’ve

lived forever, in your car that isn’t new. For

this poem to be the leaves, the many young leaves

getting green and greener in today’s long rain.

CHRISTINE POTTER lives in a very old house in New York’s Hudson River Valley. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Consequence, The McNeese Review, SWWIM, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Thimble, Roi Fainéant, Does It Have Pockets, and have been featured on ABC Radio News. She has work forthcoming in Tar River Poetry and Cider Press Review. Her time-traveling young adult novels, The Bean Books, are published by Evernight Teen, and her most recent poetry collection, Unforgetting, is on Kelsay Books.