Paula Bohince is the author of two poetry collections, both fromSarabande Books: Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods (2008; e-book 2010) and The Children (2012). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She has received the Grolier Poetry Prize, the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, fellowships from the National Endowment for the […]
Adore me, Lord, beneath this raw milk sky, your vision of silvery cream comprising daylight. I’ve kept our appointment in the barn, board after board of pine hewn by us, sit beside the pig we chose for his mildness who smiles, now, in his waste. I abide by the chickadee who stutters […]
Father’s paroled during the drought of seventy-eight only to vanish again, this time taking me with him— stealing into Levi’s pasture for cow skeletons, sun-stripped and patiently gleaming between the crushed iris. Above and around us, the electric fence hums like God— a magnification of the dreaming gnats we awakened discovering the lode of […]
Violate, coal-rubbed, like a word emboldened in an empty book or a pearl, dark silver, loose in chamois, pressed into my palm one Christmas… His thumb upon my thumb, his eyes on my eyes and everything is understood: the trespass, the lamb, the body that will come to loathe itself, for even […]
Consider three orioles— black and orange in virgin snow, definite against vapor— as a single oriole with a triune nature: one on the fence, divider of gifts, another who is pure ornament, posed stoically on the fir, and a third who is wise, the oracle playing against his fate— dashing from feeder […]
Crabgrass thickens, and catalpas bloom gigantic, hoping to hide our homestead, the poverty and grime that kept us mired here for generations, as if we were sleeping off a bender for one hundred years. Sooty hankies against our mouths, in the kitchen chicken spitting in the fryer, thick smoke rising, and we’re in the […]
clutches the clear muscles of the ice- laden branches. Without a scrap, without a word he is sentenced in red pajamas like a deposed king. This is the world’s revenge against masculine beauty: the bold color it granted it withdraws, whole, in bold statement. His eyes are black-rimmed, his fluted bones could lift if they […]
Paula Bohince Q&A on the genesis of her poem, Black Lamb.