John RC Potter
Pentimento
I just want to wrap myself around you
the way I wrap myself around a word;
I play with this word even as I say it
and feel its contours on my tongue.
The word has nuance: Pentimento
and like you is merely a memento.
I know I must begin to look at you
as one would look at a painting;
with one rub of the dusty canvas
I may see something emerge below.
Pentimento: the word creates a picture in my mind
hinting at who you are and what you’ve left behind.
If I can make sense out of this picture
and find the image in what lies below;
then I will clear the canvas completely
and with fresh strokes paint my own story.
Pentimento: a haunting sound rises and reverberates
but your peccadillo lost power and no longer resonates.
John RC Potter is an international educator originally from Canada, who lives in Istanbul. His poems and stories have been published in the following: Fiction on the Web, The Globe Review, Fragmented Voices, The Write Launch, Literary Yard, Down in the Dirt, Bosphorus Review of Books, The National Library of Poetry, Jabberwocky. Upcoming stories and poems will be published in Suspended Magazine, Blank Spaces, Plenitude Magazine, and The Stray Branch. He was a recent quarterfinalist in the ScreenCraft Short Story Competition with his entry, ‘She Got What She Deserved’. John is currently working on a novel-in-progress set in WWI-era Canada, ‘Blood from a Stone’.