Carol W. Bachofner

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​On the 8th Day She Woke Up
 
It took seven days to write everyone in. Seven days in pencil, no edits yet. On the 8th day, She woke up and laid her pencil to rest. She woke up, shook the cramps from her hands, and walked away. 
 
I want to write you. I want to write you in pencil. Go as far as possible with every detail, every trait, your tone of voice, body shifts, even your shadow angling along behind or beside your actual self. I could write you in ink, but you’d be solid matter unyielding to change, indelible and permanent. Pencil gives me options. Smudge, underline, all edits mine. Breathing more possible with pencil, a chance to take away everything, everything that is you with me. My pencil has a clean and sturdy eraser. It seems like a god.
 
**
 
Half-Haunted

Old Pima came down with the wandering sickness. It edged in when he was digging for water out back. Took over, settled into his heart for four years. There is no warning. It stayed until Grandson came home from college. Ira Hayes got it at Iwo Jima, raising a flag that didn’t recognize him. That’s how it gets in sometimes. Comes and goes. Old Pima put a walking stick by the entrance to his house. In case it comes back. He wears a dream catcher on his shirt now. He heard from an elder that the sickness comes from crazy dreams getting in through the chest. He hasn’t slept in his bed since Old Woman walked away. Grandson builds a fence to keep it out. Granddaughter cooks outside to make it think there’s no house at all. Old Pima smudges. Heya, heya, heya-hey. Linda Little Dog stopped singing and wandered off after breakfast. She might be gone an hour. A week. She might be under the road. Old Pima notices his walking stick wandered off at about the same time.
 
**
 
Sunblock, or how I was the only girl with no summer love

It’s tricky, that yellow ball in the sky. Looks friendly enough and I needed friends. All the other girls looked so pretty in their bikinis, brown and radiant. I wanted to be them, but my two-piece was modest, only my midriff showed. My mother said here, slather this white shit all over, don’t forget the tops of your ears. Of course she didn’t say shit. Way too proper for such language, and too much of a prude to understand that only the tanned girls got summer boyfriends. Or maybe she wanted to keep me out of the make-out game. Zinc-something all over me is what she wanted, not Jimmy or Donnie or Fred. All covered up, slathered in white shit and my mother’s rules, I was the only girl with no summer love. As for the sun-kissed girls, some got pregnant, some got cancer.
 
**
 
The Urn

She sits in the back pew and listens. His voice is a jet of blood, a tribal uttering, a startled song. It is a tongue no language can translate. God’s five senses magnified. The invitation had been forged. None of the usual mourners are present, the ones with faux hearts bleeding at the wake. No. But she, nearly consumed by algor, will dance for the burned, the ashed, the damned. It’s been said: someone dances for the damned to cast a spell on the living. She waits. She has a gift for shadow: a violet fragrance shaking from her hair confirms it. She had died in childbirth. She had crossed the Pyrenees by elephant. She had run along the bottom of the sea. She had climbed into her own womb to wait for this moment. It is her turn. The ashes shift ever so slightly. Her dance begins with a low fever. The tide stands on its hind legs, a cat flies into the moon.
 
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Ars Poetica, a prose sonnet by the numbers

1. Poetry. Next. Three Exits. 2. Stanzas buzz my head with rhyme, raggedy metrical wire from light pole to light pole over scrub grass and sage. 3. Words come in, spin like tornadoes whirl across the highway. The center line is broken. Fix it,  4. please. Page down   5. in my head: font, margins, line breaks  6. like dust devils. And always the burnt match ozone of inspiration. 7. The hitchhiker, dressed in someone else’s clothes, thumbs her way to the reading, 8. takes all my lines, stuffs them into her backpack; clever prestidigitation  9. I don’t see it happen  10. I don’t feel the pages go  11. I don’t hear the audience clapping  12. or notice her taking her bow. 13. Poetry, next three exits: a warning sign; wait for the next one. 14. Don’t give rides to strange poets;  carry your pen snug as a gun.
 
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Bird, a prose sonnet by the numbers
 
1. She might be the one   2. might be the one building a nest off-season in the roosting box  3. might be the one the cat has lusted after for days   4. might be the one peeking down between the slats of the porch floor   5. or the one waiting for some errant seed heads to float over to feed her   6. She might be the one doing some kind of crazy bird dance (never have seen a back flip like that)  7. might be the one looking me straight in the eye, me warm in my kitchen munching on Halloween candy   8. She might be any of these ones   9. or she might be the dead bird I’ll be crying over in a few minutes  10. Bird, could you not have tapped your beak on the window?   11. You might be the one I could have saved   12. You might be the one to come back to life,   13. but you didn’t say a single word   14. You didn’t say anything, bird.
 
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Carol Willette Bachofner is an award-winning poet, memoirist, photographer, and watercolourist. She served as Poet Laureate of Rockland, Maine from 2012 -2016. Carol is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Test Pattern, a Fantod of Prose Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Connecticut Review, The Comstock Review, Cream City Review, as well as in the anthology, Dawnland Voices, An Anthology of Writings from Indigenous New England (University of Nebraska Press, 2013). Stay tuned for what might come.