— Joseph Cornell (dream journal entry 12/11/61)

by Lee Potts

I’ve mistaken the specks and threads floating 
in my old eyes for crows against storm clouds. 
Rain interrogates the shape of everything 
it falls on and finds the sword hidden 

in every monument’s history. But once it ends 
there’s always a catastrophic forgetting.
The rain becomes rivers, the skies always clear. 
We’ll see constellations cross the ancient stage 

for our tiny applause tonight. They always hit 
their marks. I’m a man. I’m allowed to forget 
about my own body. To even forget that it’s bound 
to dissolve like some soft gritty pill under 

God’s own tongue.

Lee Potts is an Orison Anthology nominee with work in Firmament, Rust + Moth, Whale Road Review, UCity Review, Parentheses Journal, Sugar House Review, and other journals. He is poetry editor at Barren Magazine and his first chapbook, And Drought Will Follow, will be released in April 2021. Lee lives just outside Philadelphia with his wife and their last kid still at home.