Rose Mary Boehm

​My Mother the Alchemist
 
I’d watch her transform stingy nettles into spinach soup after we picked them carefully, trying to touch only the underside of the leaves. We had no gloves. Dandelion shoots became salad with a bit of vinegar and salt. She magically metamorphosed a box of our silver flatware into a hundredweight of potatoes, her last damask tablecloth somehow converted itself into another hundredweight of carrots.
 
She brought water from the pump in two heavy buckets up to the second floor on stone stairs. That became soup, drinking water, and a bird bath for my budgie. 
 
After picking up the left-over stalks from fields the farmers had finished harvesting, mother dried the wheat and ground it in the coffee mill for a chunky morning porridge. 
 
One day’s worth of sewing underpants for the Russian army mutated miraculously into bread and sometimes butter. 
 
And at the end of the day, mother made the best magic of all: with a book on her lap, by the light of a glowing fire in the wood stove, she transformed a different hunger into possibilities.
  
Sentries and markers
The hinterland of dreams
Deliverance
 
**
 
This was first publishes in Silverbirch.
 
**
 
They Will Never Again Be As Now
 
Finland 1957
 
Huge tree trunks float downstream, bobbing giants. As matches they'll soon light advent candles in Stockholm, a fuse for a mining project in the Urals, or a cigarette from which the soldier at the heavily mined East-West German border will take a deep drag in the cold night of a cold war. From the old trenches I take a bayonet. Whose bloodstain on the stainless steel? In the farmhouse, the table coated with years of dust, a saltshaker, the knife black and sticky, the plate filled with shells of dead insects, a glass turned over, a crocheted doily crumbling. A tightly shut drawer finally gives in and spills tens of small black & white photographs: family reunions, women with aprons, men with awkward suits and big hands, children smiling or hiding from the camera.
 
They jumped from the trees
Halting the Russian advance
White suits like the snow
 
**
 
La Movida
 
The old portera gives her the stink eye. That cast-iron wrought ascensor door rattles shut, her heels click-clack down those last fake marble stairs. "Slut’," the old woman mumbles under her breath. Dolores wraps her fake fur a little closer, Madrid in October at night hints at the cold that’s to come. The chauffeur is waiting. Don Martín is a generous man. Dolores gets into the back of the beige and brown Citroën, falling into the luxurious, leather-covered seat. Their table is reserved at the Casino de Madrid.
 
In the entrance hall she looks around her: like moths around the light - her fellow phalaenas who sold their bodies for the fake jewels, rent paid, and the occasional pocket money bestowed from the rare winnings at the roulette tables, blackjack, baccarat, or poker. For a brief moment Dolores remembers a small stone bridge over a fast-flowing brook, the olive trees, and an orchard. Then she walks up those carpeted stairs, head held high, Don Martín waiting for her – or for anyone who is young and willing.
 
Bling and jazz – 
Nights of laughter and lust.
Love not on sale.
 
**
 
The Gifts
 
I admired her from when we were thirteen. Mixed into the admiration where some sharp little needles of envy. She had the gift. She was Marylin Monroe, Rita Hayworth, Brigitte Bardot, Raquel Welch. No sooner than a man turned his eyes on her, sparkly lights ignited. She made a man hungry. 
 
Her mother was “Marlene Dietrich,” penciled eyebrows, blood-red lips and fingernails, a long cigarette holder, vertiginous heels, a black Mercedes. Her father, a fat autocratic patriarch with a loud voice who commanded and provided. Her clothes from boutiques, holidays on Capri.
 
She’d told me about having been stashed away on her granny’s farm during the war. Her grandmother would eat all by herself until there was nothing left. Her father soldiered at the front, her mother ran the business.
 
Husband number one: alcoholic, abusive. Beat her in drunken bouts of rage. Forced her to abort twice in back-street procedures. That was the end of kids for her.
            
Husband number two: couldn’t get it up for her, fucked at least 40 other women, never worked, made sure she believed she couldn’t survive without him. 
            
Now—mercifully—she doesn’t remember, barely remembers me. She knows, however, that I am benign. She is incontinent, can’t walk, delusional, paranoid, and I am grateful for gifts not given.
 
**
 
The Music I Used to Play
 
Chopin’s “Nocturnes,” Schubert’s “Kinderlieder,” the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” Bach’s “Two-Part Inventions,” Bela Bartók, Stravinsky, Britten… My teenage years were filled with music that lived under my fingers and the piano keys. My mother made requests for her ‘helping-her-fall-asleep’ pleasure.  My first solo performance at a youth concert showed me that I wasn’t cut out for a musical solo career. Cold sweat dripped from my fingers, making them almost slip from the ivories. 
 
Still, even though there were breaks during my travels, a piano accompanied me wherever I settled, my musical interests widened, I lived in b-flats, d-minors, soared with rising chords or the secret sin of a grace note that winked at me.
 
Then my music slowly died. My left hand needed an operation, one finger didn’t bend easily anymore— limiting what I could play and how well I could play what was left—my need to play diminishing together with the lack of soaring and the grace notes on crutches, neighbours incensed if I dared to play outside the strictly enforced hours for making noise… I gave my last upright to a school in a poor neighbourhood of Lima. They sent me photos of happy faces singing around the instrument that had sustained me for many years. And now I have learned to love my silence.
 
**
 
When Everyone on Earth Went to Mars
 
At first there were only the billionaires. Their money would be useless where they were going but they paid for the rockets and took their gold. On Mars were pioneers who’d already prepared the ecospheres for the less able to survive. The earthlings asked themselves why their rich would invest in emigration to a hostile planet instead of delighting in the most magnificent place they had been privileged to call home. Then the billionaires hopped on the next rocket and the rest of us became radio-active shadows on stone. Once Gaia was cancer-free, she rejoiced, plants and animals thrived.
 
**
 
Ode to Modern Times
 
I never went to a mailbox by the road to retrieve my letter, catalogues, and the assorted publicity produced for the rubbish bin. My letterboxes where inside my house or apartment door, or someone had already sorted through the mail and put mine on the shelf that was gaining purpose.
 
Palpable excitement, disappointment, deciding what was for opening, what was for later (suspected bills and reminders for payment). The catalogues were for leafing through their pages longingly or often snorting with disgust. What was it today? A nest of shiny stainless-steel saucepans, the latest small hoover that fit into any broom cupboard, the Dior-inspired read A-line dress, a set of knickers for five pounds. Oh, and that beige coat that made an elegant wave at the back… The rest went into the bin. How much trees did we cut down in those days? 
 
Letters took up to five days from London to Düsseldorf, responses were slow in coming. By the time they got to me my problems were usually solved. Mum would ring once a week and spend a fortune (I couldn’t afford it, the kids were too expensive, the mortgage to high, the income too small. She’d worry that I divorce, that the IRA bombs would get us, cried, and when I asked her, she said, “I have remained sixteen inside, and every time I pass that mirror there is this old woman looking back at me.”)
 
That was the time when I lost all my friends, well almost all. They married, moved away, no address, no telephone number, working hard or having small kids that took up all their letter-writing time. I learned only at a 50-year class reunion (organized through email) that my best friend had years ago died of cancer.
 
In these electronic days I set aside a time after breakfast. I made a lot of new friends on my journey and open my email with anticipation, happy for friends who write to tell me they are well, that their husbands have recovered from the open-heart surgery, stroke, COVID, that their hip replacement went like a dream, that their son is getting married. Quick WhatsApp notes to send me a meme to start my day smiling. Short posts about their mum who is losing it, the pain they feel, the kids on drugs, or getting their PhD, the jokes about the ‘old’ days, the love, the hugs, the poems, the pix. This is my sacred time of the day, and I can respond immediately, sending hugs and kisses to those who need them.
 
**
 
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as eight poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of Net nominee. The most recent poetry collections: Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders?(Kelsay Books July 2022), Whistling in the Dark (Cyberwit July 2022), Saudade (December 2022), and Life Stuff (Kelsay Books November 2023) are available on Amazon. A new manuscript is brewing, and a new fun chapbook has been scheduled for publishing summer of 2025 (Kelsay Books).  https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/