Christmas Hangover
Last night I took the wine; today the bread.
A mash of sodden scripture hurts my head.
The words beat bump thump thump like fa la la.
Each Hymn reverberates inside my jaw.
I shake the icy hand of our new priest—
We curse the wicked chill—this darn Northeast!
Back home, torn paper forms a red-green sea
While twinkle lights emasculate the tree.
The children’s voices grate like holey cheese.
Cold water shocks the shrimp from their deep freeze.
I steal away to find the couch: a nap!
(A little gift that they don’t have to wrap.)
Oh hell, the star is crooked. Make it straight.
Dear Lord, I pray the relatives are late.
Kyle Potvin’s chapbook, Sound Travels on Water (Finishing Line Press), won the 2014 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. She is a two-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Measure, Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, JAMA, and others. She is an advisor to Frost Farm Poetry in Derry, NH, and helps produce the New Hampshire Poetry Festival.