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Pascale Potvin
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the poet
Pascale Potvin, who writes as Viola Volée, has published several chapbooks – her newest, SEX, GOD, & OCD, arriving in February 2024 from Naked Cat Publishing. Thrice nominated for Best of the Net, she's also had her work put up for The Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction, as well as longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. Pascale's work has appeared in Juked, Eclectica Magazine, trampset and many others. She's Editor-in-Chief of Wrong Publishing, and writer/director of feature film, Baby Fever.
the poems
Down a Seized Throat
How can hair be healthy if it’s dead?
My bloody earlobe says the most about me.
A leaf falls onto the street
and it hardens
then softens back into a baby.
Yet while summer brings old lusts, like birds
for others, I never understood song;
On the trail, I place a bandaid for blisters in my mouth,
till the ridges of my tongue are gone.
Because, what if a wasp dove into my Flavor Aid,
like taste creates cult?
What if it was a bird? It’d have to swim.
What Does It Mean When
a Guy Says You Look Pretty
While He’s On LSD?
It means he closes his eyes,
like umbrellas stop feeling the rain.
It means that, when I wave to him,
I make the grass move with the sky.
And it means that, when I say hello, he’ll hear a rhyme:
je te veux
(my therapist said u might have a crush on me, so i need you
too scared to become famous
cause the people past our deaths might dissect your pages:
there, they would find me folded up, up in the letters’ livers like
you still tried to get me out).
Museum One
did i ever tell you that i stopped at a museum,
just a block from my house for the wifi?
i couldn’t wait longer to be touched by you;
teenage bodies are too fertile and we were the bodies in the
god oh kiss my neck, like cutting a dandelion stem,
i’ll do it, like rain water’s submissive to its leaf
(i promise if one chair in the history of the world ever got turned on
in a flash of unsolved natural mystery, it would be that one)
like nature photography (selfie of me in a top that reminds me of u)
and so what’s the point of living, or writing, i wonder?
if there’s no one left to fall for?
if there’s no one to seduce, in that order?
i’m free, my pussy against the dirt,
like it’ll never taste me again
as an artefact or a grave i would’ve
worn your name, gone on display
Publishing credits
Down a Siezed Throat / What Does It Mean When a Guy
Says You Look Pretty While He’s On LSD?: exclusive first
publication by iamb
Museum One: excerpt originally from Fifth Wheel Press'
2022 calender (Fifth Wheel Press)