PAULA BOHINCE
THE UNRAVELING
This is the field where it happened: shotgun grass
quieting casings that fell from the lesson, where cans
yipped and the kennel hushed over the summer
when Gail got the news. This is the field
where Big Jim bit the lip of his sonofabitch stallion
who’d kicked his gut, that sorrel mistake whose fetlock
went hinky, then lame, the stud fee spent
and then some, and this is the cherry, limber
in spring, blowing its kisses, and this is the walnut
stolen by arborists who promised a cut
then paid my mother in shame. I’m
on the stump, idiotic, still tasting the sawdust,
gripping a Queen Anne cordials box, her one
Christmas indulgence, bought from the Kmart before
the backroads unspooled, blue sirens
in aisles where our machine got its bobbins,
where guppies swarmed, oblivious in cities,
where I chose my training bra for its dinky charm
so when a hubbub rang down the road
I jingled, my parents running at full strength,
taking up the muddy rope lassoed round
the horse’s ribs as he reared in the ditch, in fall chaos,
the year undone, but surely there’d be another,
another, until somewhere it all tipped over. Just leave
me alone, my mother said. I’m done with the past.
She whose future was inches, my muscular dad decades
gone. I thought I’d die from confusion: unloved,
unraveled, with no one to braid me or pull.
ESCAPE TO FIJI
Swimming in a mirage, past the bull shark, sicklefin
lemon, buoyed by a personalized ocean, psychosis floating
me when I wearied, rescued thus by blue saturation, perfumed
and pumicing element, living
as on that Styx song in adolescence, trance overtaking fear
on the papasan chair,
the same biblical sentence cycling
until it engraved on my brain God’s authority. I turned
the watery page. I went to the sun unashamed, submitting to new
species: boggling palms, animals like drawings.
Say toxin again. Under a dome of aura, swirl over me
noni soap. Oils of frangipani,
verbena, gifted by the last true friend, color me in.
Flowers, include me ecstatic in your orgasm.
Opening spheres of vistas, let me buckle with, unbothered
as clownfish or mollusk. Erase me
lotioning little sister’s behind-the-ears, years of weeping
scales, skin like vellum, her head on my lap, our systems
changing
permanently, in stress. Benumbed, watching beauty queens
departing an airplane, sisterly in leis and sashes.
WOOVES
Wait, what was he asking? Wooves was how it sounded, jet-
lagged and woozy in the Highlands. Slumped dumb on Laura
Ashley, in woolens, drinking sherry, I heard, Do you
have wooves where you live? Ah, and then they came: bark-colored,
char-
coal and ash, suckling, adamant in autumnal red. I left
Cadbury bars on his studio doorstep, each one
bigger than the next to break his politesse. I bathed and watched
the rained on skylight. Burns Night Supper brought haggis
and burred recitations, talk of vintages, fox hunts.
The Oxford scholar slurred,
Did you have toy cars or a train set? The smile melting
away was a revelation, fire snarling,
hissing at the question. Alone, finally he confessed his mother
was like the iceberg in Titanic and how he felt
about that Faber rejection. A cough. A twilit handshake.
Clean as moss, I lay in castle-shadow, in moorish ambiance. Wooves
were the lips of schoolboys at water fountains after
shaggy play. His tweed jacket as he bicycled to town for bottles
of ink. Whine of the left behind echoing in the faraway.
MIDLOTHIAN GOLDFINCH
Giddy as dawn, as a promise of treasure, downwind
from the Esk, a millennium of rain erasing the temple roof,
allowing fields of moss and snowdrops. Song alert
to brokenness, leant to voices lost in wind, echoing as
no one, no one. Ecstatic bell in the steeple nest
above saplings torqued as arrows landed in a chorus.
Its call dims, in preservation, where knights once rested, grew
avid, sacrificed youth to plotting and hoarfrost, to abide
in a mutual heart, as brothers. I’m yours, the gold murmured
in dreams and waking, vocalizing each estrangement.
BONE FLUTE, 43,000 BC
Its wail fell into my feed unbidden, interrupting
trance and techno looped during the zoned-out hour
after the funeral. It called forth the cave, the ancient
bear, the femur hammered by instinct. The flutist in mother
Slovenia swayed in muslin robes, incandescent long
white hair a candle in the drip. He played the stranger’s missive
while a virus wilded. Ensconced in sunlight, like spiders
crumpled in amber, we’d stood that morning before her
name, 2021 not yet etched. Just us and a priest in a flowered mask,
a muffled commendation of her spirit, Bible thick as the
Mabinogion.
We watched an unraveling thread on his vestments soar
as he spoke, snow overwhelming the daffodils. After
the vigil, its startle tunneled through satellite and ether, laid
to rest within the delicate bones of the future. A miracle
that it should exist at all. And when tender improvisation shifted
to Ode to Joy—the familiar rampage, the forceful Go on—
it touched an anguished hollow held inside my body,
that flute the source of weeping and hope.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paula Bohince is the author of three poetry collections from Sarabande, most recently Swallows and Waves. She was the guest editor of Best New Poets 2022.