Whoever picks berries in the forest
licks fingers for their flavor
and carries the berries home in a basket,
puts them in a bowl, sugars them, and floats them
in cream; then, with a silver spoon,
eats them and finds them bitter,
knows the strange empty of the basket
and how the sun rims everything
until it descends slowly into the trees
as shadows lengthen, dim, and disappear.
Lynne Potts is a former poetry editor of AGNI. Her first collection, Porthole View, won the National Poetry Review Press Prize in 2012. A second collection, Mame, Sol, and Dog Bark, came out from the same press in 2017. Other work has appeared in The Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, American Letters and Commentary, Hayden’s River Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. Selected by the Massachusetts Cultural Council as a 2012 Fellow, she has also been awarded fellowships by Virginia Colony for the Creative Arts, Ragdale, and Moulin a Nef in Auvillar, France. She has taught poetry in the American School of Marrakesh, Morocco, and the Global Institute of Technology in New York City. She lives in Boston and New York, working as a freelance writer. (updated 7/2019)