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.