January 2021
Bio Note: If I didn’t write, especially poetry, I’d probably be up for autistic in five languages.
A German-born UK national, I now live in Lima, Peru. While my heart occasionally rummages in German, my mouth
speaks Spanish, my spirit is playing in English, and I often have to look up a French word in the dictionary.
My latest poems have appeared - or are forthcoming - mainly in US poetry reviews. My fourth poetry collection,
The Rain Girl, has just been published by Chaffinch Press in Ireland.
Missing
She shares memories about their dads,
mums, siblings—some of them dead—
mulling over the good times, the patient time,
relationships they formed, indulgences,
good will, a hot dog, love.
She looks at films that take you back to family tables,
to cozy lunches, suppers, or somewhat acrimonious ones.
They made up.
Of course.
She sees wholesome images of families doing stuff
together, holidays, picnics, chasing cows,
splashing in shallow rivers.
Coloured photos from a time that tears you up
just thinking about it.
Everything was wonderful;
some terrible guitar chords, the sing-alongs,
everyone knew the lyrics.
The old cars romantic partners in wooing or just driving across
the continent to new pastures, missing mum and dad.
She’d freed herself from family bonds, making friends
where she found them. She never missed her family.
She misses missing them.
What You Don't Have
I remember wanting to be petite,
milk-coffee coloured, black eyed.
I imagined blue-black hair rolling
down my back, small feet dancing
along the roads, long-fingered slim hands
finding flowers in the air.
Instead they made me big-boned and rosy,
blonde and blue-eyed,
hair so fine it couldn’t be platted,
big, capable hands, and feet of a size
for which it is hard to find shoes
in countries where the petites live.
Living ‘on a big foot’ is the literal translation
from German: auf grossem Fuss leben. It means
spending easily, not caring too much about money.
My mother declared me a lost big foot
‘just like your father’. Exasperated.
I have resigned myself to being
what I am, never quite accepting
that I didn’t have a long-limbed, olive-skinned
Ethiopian grandmother somewhere.
©2021 Rose Mary Boehm
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the
author (email address above) to tell her or him. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual.
It is very important. -JL