This week, Potluck turns one!
What a year it's been. In the past 365 days, we've hosted over 100 different writers, photographers, illustrators, and videographers on this site. And we are, and continue to be, very proud of their work.
So, in order to commemorate them and our one-year anniversary, each editor has decided to republish a work that he or she believes has fully exemplified Potluck, and the space we've created here. It's seriously the least we could do.
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calf-esque
Odysseus is waiting for a watcher,
a white flag against the deep empty blue.
Ten whales already killed and clawed open
with fingernails and splinters of warm wood,
Odysseus remembers his childhood home falling to pieces,
chalk white concrete spread out like elephant bones,
dust pressed into the notches of their fingers and ghost prints
all over the sun ripened grass. Soft, chewed
into the cold hills around them.
Odysseus sees mountains of wet meat and feels sorry.
Everything he loves folded over, two layers of pink film
and peach-soft insides, waves licking at the hull and Poseidon
carved into the face of an Oceanside cliff.
This is for my homies, Poseidon says
as he spills palmfuls of the sea.
there are things coming to eat us but they are wonderful things
i sold my body to science.
science sold it to someone i went to
high school with.
i lost fifteen teeth in the orgasm.
she said something to rip the white open &
i chewed the rain until it became
a little kinder,
a tiny china doll to crawl out from beneath the covers
to kiss my elbows & just to be there.
someone to take care of me
when i am the only illegitimate thing,
someone to coddle you when you are
beaten & immense. i will deflate all the air
out of you
so you will not have to suffer all the
breathing.
i will break open into a thousand
paper cranes.
i will become the most cynical part of
everything.
help my little bird body be close to you
i am the tinniest watchman in your pocket
the way the smallest things and the largest
are the same/ the hammer headed sharks
bashing holes in your dads suv we never
found, never let go of/ the quarters
rumbling inside our cheeks, pressed together,
cold and wet sorry sorry sorry/ the way
whales won’t even cry when people leave
fingerprints all over their tombstones/ the
way we snuck beer in your little brothers
sippy cups/ and took turns tasting things in the
backseat/ the way you pulled the quarters
out my lips and put them into separate
piggy banks/ the way you said you would
save them all for a rainy day.
Adefisayo Adeyeye is a writer living in southern California. He blogs and reblogs at papercranechronicles.tumblr.com.