P.F. Potvin is an ultramarathon runner, writer, and musician. He is the author of The Attention Lesson (No Tell Books). His work has appeared in Boston Review, Born Magazine, Caketrain, No Tell Motel, Sentence, and elsewhere. He is currently teaching in Miami and writing a novel.

Hopscotching the Shadows                         


On the café steps a woman sings and strums through snow while a man designs from the dark.  For him her notes hold residential kit.  So he lugs them, boxing a frame on the derelict lot across the road and by the fourth tune windows peep, doors sway, and a roof squats over.  Through the gale he beckons the woman inside.  They kneel around a candle, raise palms, and anoint each shadow with a number.  She peers hard into his face, then zings the first stone.



Number Cats in the Hospital                        


The doctors aren't too serious if you're not bleeding or unconscious.  I had a mix of one times two that should've come out to a number I could recognize.  But it didn't.  The number became a flood of bees bumbling across ancient pyramids like childhood rhymes, repeating into fascination.  That's how it goes.  You let down your guard for a second and Egypt wanders in.  The number cats claim your house as their own, and it's no easy chore getting the tails untangled.  After five or six hours most of the cats wander off to rummage other sacred parts of town.  They leave behind limp mice, loads of shit, and the buzzing doctors.  



Caught in the Mexican Percent                        


A few yards past the border's barbs a woman collapses to the ground.  She finds herself suddenly legless, tomahawking the official papers at her hound.  "Lucky!  Damn traitor dog!"  As the hound sniffs in circles for its tail, two men on pistol patrol amble to the woman's aid.  But they can do nothing but spit.  "The dog's just not part of the deal."  So the woman crawls on through the cactus maze, another victim of the quota, caught partway in and partway gone. 


A Child to Behave                                            

"My Gandhi," chants the elder cancer, cornpajama woman as she steeples her hands in a sing for Lee and Olga and cracked ham.  Although her looks have fallen like slippers, she still manages to skirt the nurses aside.  And under the light of pianos they administer their spikes.  Lee and Olga flutter down to croon along and herd doves through her lungs.  She strokes them, drags a delicate blade across each throat and coos.  "Just like teaching a child to behave."
 

© P.F. Potvin 2006.