Nocturne: Rockland Bakery, 3 AM by Christine Potter
Orderly by Hoyt Rogers I slough off former houses, former selves. They molt and blur, still half-combined: a sterile condo by the sea, pink and mauve; the creaking loft of an abandoned church; a weathered, clapboard cabin in the woods. At every window: Who’s this ragged tramp? He stares me down, as if he owns the place. I recognize him now: a mirror of who I am. Later, a schoolteacher knocks at my gate; her steadfast gaze comforts me like rain. Her halting words remold her into a man: a sad-faced orderly, with blue-white hair. Forget what I said. Your mother didn’t die. She packed her bags and moved next-door. She needs to hold you, to love you again. In another dream, I take his hand. We want you to be joyful, I laugh. We want you to tear us apart like the pages of a book, and swallow them one by one. Just as you do with all of us, just as you do with yourself. We want you to be truthful, faithful to your own end.
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Hoyt Rogers is a poet, translator, and novelist. He has published many books; he has contributed poetry, fiction, essays, and translations to a wide variety of periodicals. His edition of Yves Bonnefoy’s Rome, 1630 received the French-American Foundation’s 2021 Translation Prize. His latest collection of poems is Thresholds (MadHat 2023), his latest translation is Yves Bonnefoy’s The Wandering Life (Seagull 2023), and his latest novel is Sailing to Noon (Spuyten Duyvil 2023, volume one of The Caribbean Trilogy). Born in North America to an ethnically diverse family, he has spent most of his life in Latin America and Western Europe. He was educated at Columbia, Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford. Please visit his website, hoytrogers.com.
