Alicia Potee
Hermitage
Within a dream, I dream of trees: your face,
alight with cedar, spruce, tobacco, hair
of dog—its sweet and peated mouth in prayer,
the smoldered hope that pulled me to this place,
where time escapes your follicles and shakes
off memories like ash into thin air.
It wears your empty pores like gloves, hides bare
hard bones inside the winter’s wool embrace,
and knits you back to life between my thighs,
my hands, your jealous fountain’s flaxen head
like velvet spears on autumn’s aimless deer.
O socketless menagerie of eyes—
O revenant, suspended by a thread—
your wasted song, so soft the dead can hear.
Alicia Potee is a 2002 graduate of St. John’s College in Annapolis and current MFA candidate at the University of Baltimore. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sky Island Journal, Radar Poetry, Gone Lawn, trampset, BRUISER, Chestnut Review, Comstock Review, Hawaii-Pacific Review, Little Patuxent Review, and Baltimore Review, among other places. She lives in Towson, MD with her tiny zoo of children and pets.