Rose Mary Boehm- Three Poems

After the Floods

Relentless programming of blood sacrifices consumes

the halcyon days of summer. Autumn gold hides

behind blind transom windows and hoary doors.

Transient bitterness settles in the dark, squishy roots

of inducement. Turning lazily in the river waters,

swollen wooden shapes hint at their former integrity.

Colliding fronts squash floating stars, giving

no inducement to those who would stay.

Early Dawn

At this hour the world is dark and empty.

Her toes don’t have to touch the cold stone floor

to understand the value of a warm bed.

She doesn’t have to lift the curtain to confirm

the green mix of pale-yellow street lamps

and the first blue morning glow. She turns

over, reaches across for his body and her

hand finds no purchase. She buries her face

in his pillow, takes a deep breath and remembers

his bent back, coat collar up against the wind.

Red

once seen can never be forgotten,

nor the deaf percussionist.

Zbigniew’s reincarnation in the

e-minor concierto by van den Budenmayer.

Ghost stored in tin cans and

spilled all over the old tapes.

Les Marionettes transformed

into music between gardens.

​A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and a poetry collection published in 2011 in the UK, ‘TANGENTS’, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a good two dozen US poetry reviews as well as some print anthologies, and Diane Lockward’s The Crafty Poet. She won third price in in the 2009 Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse (US), was semi-finalist in the Naugatuck poetry contest 2012/13 and has been a finalist in several GR contests, winning it in October 2014.