Boy

This poem appears in the print edition of The Colby Review.

was what we called Great-Uncle Eugene who was the baby of his family though now the baby was short of breath and his pants couldn’t decide whether to ride over his gut or under it. This was in the old days, the 1970s, when some people visited uncles in California and other people were stuck with uncles from Pittsburgh. Liberace was the closest thing to a drag queen on TV, unless you counted Joe Namath in his fur coat. We use to watch two TVs at the same time, one for the picture, one for the sound, and if we didn’t slam the screen door hard someone had to climb onto the kitchen table in bare feet and tack up sticky ribbons so flies wouldn’t swoop the lunchmeat. Jell-O salad was what the aunts fixed on Sundays, before they drove out from Pittsburgh in a Chevy full of Tupperware and Boy. My sister would slowly poke every one of Granny’s Lucky Strikes into the coal stove, and after supper we’d count up our penny-ante-poker winnings and cram fistfuls of coins into matching beaded purses. I was saving up for some white boots until my mother explained that a boy who dressed like that probably wouldn’t get accepted at college. I was learning my lesson. Already I was mutating into a planet, the sort that visits the sun once every thousand years and the rest of the time no one knows what it’s up to.

---

Dawn Potter’s latest poetry collection is Calendar (2024). A finalist for the National Poetry Series, she has also won a Maine Literary Award in nonfiction. Her work appears in the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Dawn directs poetry programs at Monson Arts and lives in Portland, Maine. She is the 2026-2031 Maine Poet Laureate.