Before We Were Born

By Carol Potter

I admire the power of Carol Potter's dry, dreamy, country voice, its joyful sexuality, its insights, its understated humor. This is an odd and shrewd and most valuable book. --Jean Valentine

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Release date: Jun 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781949944051

Book preview

ONE

The Children Who Haven’t Stopped Moving

We rode the train through the north woods,

five children nodding like old men

at the familiar names: North Creek, Speculator.

Somebody behind us kept whispering, Paradise.

There was an old woman in his arms. He shifted

his feet on the bare wood floor, held her waist

as if she were a baby with wings

threatening to fill the train with her gaggle.

The old man leaned over the seat: She drinks too much.

We didn’t say anything. "Who the hell told you kids

it would be any different?" We pretended to be asleep.

I lay back, dreamed of white moths

scraping their wings against the windows.

We were the lights about to go out.

I saw the dust from their backs

fill the glass; I always thought it was the dust

made them fly. I woke in a car of frost-

glazed windows. We began scratching our names

in the rime.

Behind us, he kept whispering, "If you don’t like it,

just get up and move." There were no

other seats. We could see the woods animals

up in the tops of trees, waving at us, like grandmothers—

their white handkerchiefs flagging the breeze.

The Trouble with Horses

He had arms he couldn’t

understand.

His arms were horses

with bits clamped between their teeth,

two horses bolting, a pack of children

clinging to their backs,

fifty child fingers

digging in the horses’ manes.

The manes blew

in the children’s faces,

their faces were balloons

rising from their necks,

their necks were saplings

rising from their bodies.

Surprised to find so much air,

already the children were trying to forgive.

All Six of Us Suspended Above Blue Seats

It seemed simple. You were walking

across the jetty while I climbed down

and headed the other direction

across the sand flats, and you didn’t

look back or you just didn’t hear me calling.

It might have been the wind blowing flock after

flock of birds screeing in one direction, or the way the tide

was going out pulling the bay back

through the breakwater, but there was no way

you were going to hear me. Bemused almost,

I watched you disappear off the jetty

and across the dunes. You went one way

and I went the other

as if we’d known all along

no matter what else we wanted,

this was the way it was going to go.

Earlier, walking together on the jetty, you stopped

to tell me how each time you stepped from one rock

to another, over that deep gap between stones,

somehow you felt as if you were falling.

It is that double sensation in the belly, one part lifting

and the other half disappearing

downwards as if the heart could fly

but the legs were lead, and it made me remember