Poetry Winter 2020 fiction all issues
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Paula Reed Nancarrow
Morning Coffee
& other poems
Jill Burkey
Mala
& other poems
Oak Morse
Boys Born out of Blues
& other poems
Beatrix Bondor
Engine Ode
& other poems
Monique Jonath
a mi sheberach
& other poems
Lisa Rachel Apple
Bounty
& other poems
Gillian Freebody
The Human Condition
& other poems
Kirsten Hippe-Rychlik
and we are echoes
& other poems
Devon Bohm
Forgiveness
& other poems
Jeddie Sophronius
I Rest My Mother Tongue
& other poems
John Delaney
Poem as Map
& other poems
Elizabeth Bayou-Grace
Fire in Paradise
& other poems
Monaye
In Utero
& other poems
Michelle Lerner
Ode to Exhaustion
& other poems
William French
I Have Never Been
& other poems
Josiah Patterson Wheatley
Coeur de Fleurs
& other poems
Karo Ska
womb song
& other poems
Robyn Joy
Sisyphus
& other poems
Han Raschka
Love Language
& other poems
Rebbekah Vega-Romero
The Memory in My Pinky
& other poems
Gilaine Fiezmont
Europe, too, Came from Somewhere Else
& other poems
Scott Ruescher
At the Childhood Home of Ozzy Osbourne
& other poems
Emily R. Daniel
Visitation Dreams
& other poems
Lindsay Gioffre
Toxicodendron Radicans [Sonnet 1]
& other poems
Devon Bohm
Careful Cartography
The first time I died was in my mother’s belly.
They had to scrape me out of her
like they were emptying a cantaloupe
of all that was good to eat.
-
They found me still alive.
They found me screaming.
I splattered my father’s glasses with blood
and he fainted, pitched down hard
to that mess of linoleum
and whatever viscera came with me.
-
I didn’t mean to hurt them.
But I am not someone who was born knowing
words like dishonor
and no matter how many books I devour starving
I have always spit out that pith, those seeds.
-
I wanted to grow up to be a Cartographer,
but I ended up a writer.
My maps are harder to follow,
and heavier to read,
but they are still trying to lead us somewhere better.
-
Even before I was born, I had to command attention.
I won’t pretend to remember, remembrance
is too precious for that, but I can imagine.
I stopped my own heart.
I am the kind of person who will always find a language to suit her.
I have been me, the hollow place for the conversation,
all communications, to echo,
long before my tongue grew in.
-
I studied maps before I learned how to go anywhere.
It has never been about going somewhere.
All of you who crave exquisite, exotic adventure,
I have a secret to tell:
you’ll still be there, wherever you go.
This makes all places the same,
and if you’re happy, home.
I wasn’t born happy.
I was born as I am:
with the careful cartography in my veins aching for home.
-
I have kept dying the way I’ve kept reading:
like a plough whose furrows hope to dig deep enough to seed.
Herbs, flowers without thorns so the bees can make me honey,
can pollinate, so more can blossom, quicken, grow.
I am not dying just to get your interest,
I am dying because sometimes maps are not enough.
-
No matter how uncharted the voyage, I have made it this far:
alive and still screaming.
I will never mean to hurt you, but
I have places to be and I have to find a way to speak them.
It is the way I was born.
Gardening
I.
Dirt is so many shades Give me: bole,
sepia, fallow, fawn, sienna burnt umber
tan, russet, redwood taupe, buff, ochre, mahogany
I let them fold into me, digging my hands in
little hand spades
I am not gardening, I am burying
I want to make the world grow but I haven’t
been granted that power
I let the earth crease me, move over me in waves
But it disallows my tampering, my efforts to change
II.
When I was eight
my favorite number, the sign for infinity, my birth date
my mother and I moved into a little house
with stone fruit trees in the backyard
apricot and plum
They only bore fruit that first year
The leaves like little worms and bruises
but no fruit again
The dog dug up our tulip bulbs
my favorite flower
then the tiger lilies
then he settled in to eating rocks
and mud
and veterinary bills
Then our family killed the hydrangeas
I bought for Mother’s Day
Then a desktop bamboo plant
Then
a cactus
III.
When I was even smaller
a rose petal in a palm
we lived in a house somewhere far away surrounded by citrus
The heavy fruits appeared as if from nothing year after year
we didn’t know death yet
My father must have tended them though I can’t remember
anything but sun, the pool on Christmas
The lemons were so sweet I ate them sectioned
no sugar
They filled my mouth with sores
I found out years later I’m allergic
one of the rarest allergies in the world
I wanted to ask if I’m allergic to dirt too
to growing, if it is really me who kills everything we try to raise
The pin-prick test raised welt after welt along my back
But No the technician said I’m sorry We just can’t test for that
His eyes as wet as a slippery melon half moon
IV.
I can’t touch the wisteria vine though I know its climbing
I can only observe a sunflower from a great distance
A baby robin a pullet, a colt, a jake died in my yard today
the shell still opening on the pavement a pale blue
white
speckled, jagged, sharp, a reminder of what I can do
I have only the power of a poet
to memorialize
to bury
and to know: that, too
I do poorly
Forgiveness
In the two years between my father’s death, his lung cancer, and your
almost-loss, your heart attack, I began to see signs, beacons silvering
the dark: white cigarette papers, white paleness of fingers, white coats,
white eggshells in the white sink with no eggs to show for them,
white sweeter than its own sugar, that white of a mild oblivion.
You think you’re owed my forgiveness because you’re my mother,
now, but what about then? Rule #1: All poets are monsters.
Your grief made you a poet. Your grief made one of me too.
I became a poet the day you made me limp back into the metallic-
scented dusk of the hospital to see another parent spread out
across the whiteness of sheets like a stain. Nicotine-yellow, an old
bruise come to meet me. I began a habit then I’ll never shed,
I name people by the way I think they’ll leave me: in death,
by accident, of their own volition, selfishly, selfishly, selfishly.
Rule #2: All poets are optimists. In these past two decades
we have become geniuses of the distracted barb, of inflicting pain
on the most tender swath of flesh, we have checked in together
to the hospice of living with each other. We have never walked
on the same sand again, and though you have never smoked another
cigarette, my name for you is still White Smoke. I still see it hanging
above your head, a brainfire, misfire, wetting the white hairs
at your scalp as if with dew. If I was fair, I’d throw stones at my
father’s ghost as well. But what joy can one grasp in yelling at the dead?
Rule #3: All poets are sadists. It’s the same amount of joy I hold
when I dog about after you. I’d like to think I could never
make my mother cry, but if I’m being honest we wring each other
out with each crack of the neck, each blink, each twist of hair
and each eyeballed moment. If I’m being honest, some part of me
wants to, wants you to feel like I do. Rule #4: All poets are masochists.
The skin on the backs of your hands is shivery, paper husked
in half, gutted—those veins trace a history of waving pain away,
of gathering it back to us again. They are blue, purple, they
are bruises, they are shadows of the same bird wings etched beneath
my sleeping eyelids, the ones that wake me. I know that. I know
it all, but. But isn’t my inability to forgive you a kind of love?
You mean too much to me. I have kept you only a breath away,
an exhalation, a smoke away from me for all these long, broken years.
I would never show this poem to anyone, I promise. I would
never tell what I can still feel you doing to me: forgetting, leaving,
so selfishly, selfishly, selfishly. Remember. Rule #5: All poets are liars.
Grocery Shopping With You
was as exciting as museums, the way you looked in museums like the Tate Modern when we lived in London and I was catapulted into you—it was ruthless, an oven-fresh kind of love that sprang out of the way you looked at things, as if they were oranges and you were sucking out the pith of them or maybe the way you moved through that one display, that stuttering lapse in judgment that was the giant-sized table and chairs hanging above your head because those misfits were so big you walked under them your palms not touching, but skirting so lightly, looking but not touching and bringing them
new life by the way you gave them something less myopic than a human eye, as if you were tall enough to see the tops
or maybe as good as going to Marseilles, which we chose because they mention the city in Casablanca, the sea-town foaming up, snoring away in sleep with salted ticks against time passing when we took the little boat to the Ile d’If, that island prison unchanged from the days it housed a guard rhinoceros and The Count of Monte Cristo and was stained with its wallowing, a clamshell beach that was lapped by water not emerald or turquoise, but a gray you made gather its sheen to throw on my hair, bees droning lazily in black-eyed susans as you took my picture and told me you loved the way I stood solo, alone, apart and my mouth looked like I had been eating blueberries so raw it was from kissing you
and even later, after you were not mine, after we were not each other’s for reasons, reasons were given but still, still
even later when I visited you in your new-old home in Chicago and we saw the Bean, but you did not look closely or take pictures because you passed it every day on your way to work, you suggested we go to the store for milk and bread and everything bagels, but you stopped yourself, knowing such a trip would be too intimate, too much like sex, more like sex than the sex we had that morning in your new-old bed, pretending we no longer loved, were no longer lovers, pretending intimacy, that picking out ripe avocados, was the dirtiest word of all
The Beginning of It
I left my blood
in uneven patches
all over Rhode Island.
Sliced the soft, untouched arch of my foot
in the shallows as the boat was brought to dock
and hobbled in to a rainsoaked July.
-
Bruises fade more quickly now
that your mouth has moved across my body.
So do bug bites.
So do the blunt pains
of moving through a quiet life.
-
When I wake next to you
in a room with no curtains,
this is what I see:
freckles,
burned in a planetary splay
over shoulders corded with muscle
that move like wings stirring under your skin
when I run my nails up and down your back.
When we brush our teeth together,
side by side in the wide mirror,
reflected is the moment
you put your hand on the small of my back
when you lean over to turn the faucet on.
When we swim in the ocean
on the deserted beach,
bringing cheap beer in the can
out into the frigid water,
my whole head is drowning
in the look of you, in the unwritten moment
you emerge right next to me,
the cold no longer circling my ribcage.
-
You are giving me something,
and you don’t even know it.
You are enough it takes no toll on you.
-
Later, reading
in the grass by the salt pond,
the wound beneath me reopens.
It will reopen again and again.
I know we are standing on top of the headland
and deciding whether or not to jump.
I know I am bleeding.
But I don’t want to rewrite anything.
I don’t want memory to have to suffice for you.
I don’t want to imagine the poem of my life.
I want to reopen my wounds again and again,
knowing they heal faster in your company,
limping into August,
hoping for September,
my blood uneven heel prints on sandy ground.
Devon Bohm
received her BA from Smith College and earned her MFA with a dual concentration in Poetry and Fiction from Fairfield University. In 2011, she was awarded the Hatfield Prize for Best Short Story, and in 2020, she was presented with an honorable mention in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest. Her work has also been featured in publications such as Labrys, Necessary Fiction, and Spry. Follow her on Instagram @devonbohm.