Ben Potrykus plays in the band Bent Shapes and puts out a zine called Cake Time. His writing has appeared in The Boston Counter Cultural Compass, and on Vice.com. By day, he works at a local non-profit, focusing on homelessness prevention.

Ben Potrykus

Barefoot in the Annuals

The red and white paddle-boat
I’d pirate from my parents each summer
to take my brother and a pot of illegal clams
to the other side of the still bay
is under two inches of snow in the yard.

How does a boat get this far inland?
Tsunami, pickup truck, small boys with dog
dragging it across the front yard.

We tore it up: the hard-packed beach,
our mother’s day-lilies. We were covered
in the slick, dark mud that comes up
near the drainage pipe stuck in at the water-line
like an iron dogfish, the resistant, gold-flecked soil,
sunbathed and dry as bread crumbs,
the earth that so desperately wants us back.

— Ben Potrykus