August 15 was the one-year anniversary of this blog, and  I can't decide if I feel like I've just started the project or have been writing these posts forever. So in honor of the blog's birthday, and of the Harmony Free Fair--which at this time of year infects the citizens of Harmony like typhoid--I will once again post "The Skillet Toss," a poem from Boy Land that appeared in my first post.

But I also have some questions for you. Is this blog interesting? Should I keep writing it? Should I make changes? And if so, what? Writers are, by their nature, self-involved; yet they also want to communicate, to converse, to share. I want this blog (have I mentioned how much I hate the word blog?) to be an open letter to you, newsy yet not self-indulgent. So if I can do better, please let me know.

The Skillet Toss

Dawn Potter

Harmony Fair, September 2002

A loose, laughing huddle of women

gathers alongside a swath of packed dirt,

hot children milling underfoot

clutching half-empty cans of soda;

and now husbands drift over, and we

arrive, who don’t throw skillets,

 

ready to cheer on our friend Tina,

who baby-sits our kids and doesn’t take shit.

Ask the contestants what they’re aiming at

this year, they’ll all say husbands.

Men are proud to have a wife who can

fracture skulls, if she thinks it’s worth her while.

 

They watch, amused but unsurprised—

married too long to doubt the plain lack

of vanity a high school sweetheart

acquires by forty. Tina practices her swing,

all knees and elbows under the sun;

the crowd watches, relaxed

 

and easy-tempered in the heat,

last hurrah of a Maine summer:

such weather can’t last; frost on the way:

in this town we never forget January;

so oh, the pleasure now of watching

sweat run down a brown arm,

 

first arc of a skillet in the heavy air

and the slow rise of dust when it lands:

Applause, laughter; Tina wipes

her forehead and takes aim for the next,

all eyes on her target: invisible Everyman

in the haze, asking for it, his voice

 

a low grumble of content, like oxen

flicking their tails in the barn—

and just fool enough to turn his back,

bare elbows propped on the fence,

watching a couple of ponies drag

their burden of concrete across the ring.

[from Boy Land & Other Poems (Deerbrook Editions, 2004)].