Excerpt from Careful Cartography, Bohm's first poetry collection due out in November 2021 from Cornerstone Press
Ruby
The problem is you keep trying to use your eyes,
even when the candle takes its inexorable last
gasp of oxygen and blinks out. There is a difference
between darkness and being invisible, but I wouldn’t
want to hurt your pride by tracing your outline
with my hands. When I was a little girl, I liked
getting dirty, I liked mud. My mother once found me
curled in around myself and coated, an embryo
in the earth’s dark womb, trying for camouflage.
But I knew down to the calcium in my bones
that someone would find me, come looking, reach
out. Remember how I looked at you—the light all
the flickering yellows of silks on fire—before?
I am looking at you the same way now, but
I have learned to use something else for the looking.
My mother didn’t bake bread, but she would make
me piece after piece of buttered toast. There are other
ways to find someone than to look for them. Hold
the fat ruby in your palms and warm it, its facets
cut as sharp as my mother’s knives. Do you hear
a cannon? No, no. That’s nothing more than my
heart in your hands, beating and trying to let you
see with whatever sense will leave you something
other than fooled by what’s presented, something
beaming through the dark.
Things My Mother Taught Me
If you’re uninterested in the world, it’s because you’re uninteresting.
Don’t let a man serenade you. A little salt goes a long way. Most
clothes are better off air drying. An accent rug is a great way to bring
a room together. No one is a stranger, we’re all just people—half-strangers
only. Plan your grocery list by the route you take through the supermarket.
When it rains it inevitably downpours, bring an umbrella. Funerals aren’t
for the dead. Don’t love a man who drinks gin. If you keep eating that much
salt, you’re going to develop high blood pressure. You wouldn’t get so
many headaches if you drank more water. 3 a.m. is both too late and too
early for your bullshit. You don’t need two parents, even if it would have
been nice. Any hurricane can be weathered if you kind find a safe harbor,
if you move far enough inland. Any fire can be survived if you make
your way toward the coast. You can build a palace wherever you land.
Don’t go near the edge of the cliffs—erosion. Don’t fuck with snakes,
just get out of there. Or wasps. Most people would be better off without
tombstones. If your spouse dies, you become a wonder of the world
if you can manage to keep going. Taste before you season. Yawning
when someone else does is a sign of natural empathy. It’s okay to ask
for what you want. Always have wine in the house. If you pretend to be
happy, the pretending will become real, eventually. Expiration dates are
meaningless. Life is relentless, so you’ll have to be relentless, too. Love
isn’t the kind of thing that dies when a person dies. Red is a little much
for a bedroom, maybe try the kitchen. It costs nothing to be kind, but
you wouldn’t know it from other people. Unconditional love is the only
option when you really care. Devon, that is definitely too much salt.
It’s illegal to have the car’s inside light on at night (it’s not.) You have
one job in this life: Be better. Be kinder. Be more than those that came
before you. Eat when you’re hungry and listen to your body to tell you
when its full. Unconditional love is worth whatever pain comes with it.
When you’re lost, go back to the ocean. Anything and anyone can be holy.
Even with that much salt.
The Week All the Fish Died in the Biology Lab
March flying in, sudden as a promise
and half as charitable, has me dreaming
again of the red dirt desert, flushed
with held heat and the secrets only
cinders can hold—secrets that burn down
cities only to reveal nothing at all
in the wreck. Invert the matchsticks,
so they’re all sulfur with wooden tips,
and let the pinks and gold of a good, dry
sunset dance along your fingertips.
It’s not that I miss being warm, it’s more
nonsensical than that: I miss fire days.
(That’s a secret, but I’m trusting you
with it, with this:) while in this part
of my country children dreamed of sledding
days, crumbs of cinnamon rolls scattered
among coffee cups, I was watching my world
burn. Our gardens filled with ice plant
and yarrow, yucca and juniper (acacia trees
with no giraffes to trim them)—we tried
only vaguely to save ourselves, save
anything precious and hold it in our laps
in the car as we drove away, drove
to the sea. You know the Renaissance
paintings with all the little cupids caught
up in the corners? Why do I need to witness
destruction to learn how it is I’m to love?
Waiting Room in Spring
Poetry is always coming back to nature,
to the sweet peas bowing their frowzy
heads, to the white plumage of the sea
birds flashing past your eyeline like
angels alighting, to those who will be
inheritors of the earth. We may be meek,
you and I, Mother, but we are the same
in other ways: even quiet pride can stop
the resurrection of the tulip bulbs. I have
forgiven you, but I can’t stop reminding
you of that forgiveness, I can’t stop
remembering what it is to see you trying
to fix your hair in a hospital bed. Your hair,
dyed dark, unchanged since my childhood,
raven feathers whispering fiercely around
the gold-hued opening of your face. Neither
of us can grow anything—this was the edifice
I built my life around, mouth puckered over
a sour, granular truth. I thought of the trees
in our backyard, the fruit once harvested never
to return, the hydrangeas every Mother’s Day
dead by June, how I died in the womb, and
I stoked bonfires—chemical scent of butane
instead of the cool, rich, loaming of the soil—
when I should have let that wood live onward
and upward for everyone to hold. Mother,
we were wrong. We are more than disaster,
destruction, death, though we’ve seen it follow
us. Those small animals in the underbrush
aren’t scurrying away, they want us to follow
them, nip at their heels for once. There are
gifts to be given, if we could let go of enough
of our burden to receive them. We needn’t
carry so much, we needn’t be so heavy.
The tulips need a light hand, and I know, I
know. So do I. And so do you deserve one:
softly, softly brushing back your hair in bed.
Participation Trophies Handed Out Each April
They don’t hand out participation trophies for staying alive, but maybe they should.
At least for those of us who can see the gloaming gathering under the gables
of the house, can see the rust growing on the frowsy petals in the garden,
can hear the tap, tap, tap of the woodpecker bringing down
spring in the impalpable night. Transmutation,
a dirty word (we don’t like change
made real in our insomnia,
our dreams while
waking)
(our heads
full and
alighted
with
aureoles
of wild
hair and
wild lights)
and a
snake-
tongued
one
hinged on belief,
beguiling and impossible.
How does one believe in anything?
How does one not be the drowned man
in all the briny clutch of it? Waving, waving
in the ocher light, waving, waving as the robin clicks
its tiny talons along the new planks of wood on the porch
to announce new spring green, nothing like emerald. No,
nothing like emeralds, nothing precious like all of that.
About Devon Bohm:
Devon Bohm received her BA from Smith College and earned her MFA with a dual concentration in Poetry and Fiction from Fairfield University. After serving as Mason Road’s Editor-in-Chief, she worked as an adjunct professor of English. She was awarded the 2011 Hatfield Prize for Best Short Story, received an honorable mention in the 2020 L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest, and was long-listed for Wigleaf’s Top Very Short Fictions 2021. Her work has also been featured in publications such as Labrys, Necessary Fiction, Spry and Sixfold. Her first book of poetry is forthcoming in Fall 2021 from Cornerstone Press. Follow her on Instagram @devonpoem or visit her website at www.devonbohm.com.