No Day Is Safe from News of You

Dawn Potter

Morning breaks like glass.

I sidle through the kitchen,

naked as a hoptoad, but nary a glance

hipes my way.

My love, he loves me with an H; he feeds me

with hay and hieroglyphs. Hélas.

Cold wind blusters under a second-rate sun.

The speckled rooster hoicks his brag to heaven.

Our only news is bad news,

squawk his twelve insatiable hens.

Their feathers blow backward. In the patchy daylight

they shimmer like a straggle of dahlias.

Sing ho for the new year, croons the magazine to an empty room.

The stovepipe ticks,

but Nothing, nothing, nothing, says the clock.

My love, he loves me with an H; we breakfast

on hum-birds and humble pie,

though yesterday we ate husks.

Time flies! shouts the rooster, and the yeast agrees.

It swims in a blue bowl,

morning-glory blue, color of a blind eye.

Every headlong day my love’s heart sings,

Weariness, yes, weariness, and never enough cash.

O holy night-before-last, when it forgot the words,

when I dreamt of turrets and stairs. Only

the radio kept muttering the tune.

[first published in Poetry Salzburg Review, spring 2012; forthcoming in Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)]