Poetry — August 26, 2013 10:30 — 0 Comments

Two Poems – Adam Boehmer

Three White Hairs in a Small Black Box

The fact is:
no one brings anyone with them when they reach the star-star paradise.

Once you get there,
it is like eating lotus flowers and all of your friends sinking
become the sweet singing of the tulip fields waiting to be farmed
and framed on somebody else’s table.

Hello to my mother in the only dangling state of Florida:
your sadism is missed.

I take the puppet of this life and shake him,
amazed at his resilient construction.

And in the green-green grass of my backyard,
the neighbors in their condos break a shadow over my lowly 1920’s building:

Hey! I’m here in a threadbare T-shirt I paid $100 for too!

Let’s fuck the love right out of each other until all our walls are clear-clear glass,
and the seeing of, the eating of all delicacies from all discovered countries.

 

 

Summer’s Ghost

On the dock,
a woman strips the paint off
her toenails in a yellow & black chevron swimsuit.

She is preparing to paint them a creamy gold.

A man casts a child-sized fishing pole into the water
to show his son how it’s done.

We teach a man named David how to dive:

You push from the knees.
You aim with your arms.
You just go.

There are tandem cannonballs.

When we leave,
the dock will roll up like a carpet underneath the earth
where it is stored when we are not there.

The lake will miss the dock, and us.

In the night,
she will lap at the coast for trace of sandal or towel.

Bio:

Adam Boehmer is an artist, writer, and musician living in Seattle, WA. His poems have appeared in Spork, Gertrude, Off the Rocks, CityArts magazine, and the anthology The Full Spectrum from Knopf Books. His collection White Wood was recently named a finalist for the Eli Coppola prize. Sweaters & GLASS, a collaborative book project with LA-based artist Maggie Carson Romano, is forthcoming this fall. He makes folk music under the name Tenderfoot. For more information visit: Adamboehmer.com and Tenderfootmusic.com.

Leave a Reply

What am I?

Bioluminescent eye
That sees by the shine
Of its own light. Lies

Blind me. I am the seventh human sense
And my stepchild,
Consequence;

Scientists can't find me.

Januswise I make us men;
Glamour
Was my image then—

Remind me:

The awful fall up off all fours
From the forest
To the hours…

Tick, Tock: Divine me.

-- Richard Kenney