[x]

The Post*
The blue mail-satchel bumps and sways, brings them in,
rigid with the weight of promise;

envelopes, dessert-colored, a delicacy,
the brittle folds filled with scent,
a creme transfer over time, to me.

I open each with the reverence
of seashells and oceanic loves.

I cut apart the shore that separates us
with a letter-opener, the sound of water.

You have arrived
before your body.

I settle into my pulse
and the resounding ambiance of my privacy
while your words touch my lips.
*

I.
We stand in our reamed maze of consent--
faces, throats thrumming
on parallel shoulders;

a doorway, at dusk;
a barefoot dance sung over by bird

the future is for gypsieswe are all twenty three point five degrees shy
of even, a people off-kilter and invariably prodigal, timid
as our buffalo. you have a hometown, i say out loud
while driving in it, and you murmur something about murder,
the dusky war over your head. you say those birds don't
even know about the obliquity of the ecliptic, and here
they are, trying to change it with all their weight in the sky.
twenty three point five, you repeat, your mouth around it
gingerly as a psalm, as a lioness with cubs, and we keep driving.
there are sights: a stripped-wire cherry tree, its fragile arms tipped
with ravens, their children unstrung and clinging

MoshtarakYou came in combat shorts
controlling attention
my American,
Speaking poetry to me
unintentionally
in pidgin Pashto.
I'm sure you've blown skulls
wide open with half formed words
and you frightened me
with your fearless fire.

You chased away the trouble that had
settled heavy over my shoulders and down into
every hair and pore and breath like desert dust.

You were different.
Your eyes shone with the promise
of golden gates
and red bridges to white sheets
across blue gaps and hotels and museums and forests full of God
and everything
and everything seemed possible.

I did not think you would leave me.

And it returns from

Roses III: Blood RedA word. Face turned away to the silent distance,
A mirror of pain within eyes too young for this dance.

Terraced landscape down her graceful teenage spine,
Chin to knees, arms arched in a perfect synchrony of limbs.

She closed her stinging eyes and wished, as she inhaled the starchy air of the studio, that it was that easy to forget the ruins she had just postponed from her mind. With the abandon of despair, she chased one joint with another, her body a perfect arch of visual melody. Hers was the ballet of discordant precision, as she ravaged onto her body the same cacophony that her emotions drummed out onto her heart.

Within the dark

churchlord you spun me out
of morning rays and mexican
china, out of paper elephants
and camomile flowers. you took
the tongue
and ears away from a deaf
mute and gave them to me
so i could hear the others
say speak the word of jesus
wide-eyed like children, so that
i could say my name is emily,
my name is emily but i can't
remember who
i am.

lord you gave me green
whisky when all i needed
was a glass of water in
the middle of the
night and arms instead
of a parting knife.
you wrote me a poem and
put it inside me and
the words smelled like sex
and tea leaves, carrot-flowers that
will emerge from the dirt
someday
smiling an

green is goldI remember when she was a bird.
They gave her a room under the earth, and all year round she sat between the walls and the ceiling and the floor and struck her flint fingers together, burning cinnamon sticks to stifle the dying leaf smell of her.
One day another girl with fire in her long wheat-blonde hair walked in through a new door and said "I am the last days of summer" and she reached for the girl's hand but the girl couldn't hold on. She said "you are not strong enough" and the summer-girl walked out of the room. The next day she was back, and held on, and let go. This time she left at the girl's feet

je ne sais quoiagainst my chest you make a soft semi-colon as my hips
     press into yours and you yield like damp paper

and against my chest the pulse of us
     a filament-hum in a sixty-watt bulb

and my chin against your neck, an impromptu bookstop

and your cheek runs against
     my stubble and it is an embossed leather cover

and our noses meet

beads of sweat on my brow roll against yours and we are
     a printing press

until our dilated eyes meet like magnifying glasses
     and our lips touch like the curves of an

out of Gardenwhat sea
how it is welling your eyes a wet mess

what tide
where urchins of the ocean will spill to howl their elegy
where mermaids will turn widows
once brine has swallowed whole their sailor babes

stewarding the land instead
is why i never set sail with you

but to lay in gardens, oh…

a bed sheet rotten by the ultraviolet
and our laps full of stars

what black soil will pervert your knees there
where moonlight will mirror out from your teeth
to run fanatic toward cosmic space
after bathing in the space among us

where walking air pushes every dust

one of sun-dried butterflies
one of beaten rug with broom
one of hone

AutumnSomething happened in autumn. Besides the leaves turning, anyway. They weren't very pretty this year, to be honest. The trees changed unevenly because of the lack of rain in the summertime. The sky was gloomy for most of October.

I wanted to take photos of the trees with you before they turned. You know, cliché nature shots. A hillside lined with red and umber foliage. Maple leaves sprinkled over the patio after the unexpected snow in October shocked them. Milkweed spores detaching from their pods and drifting away. Things to line the inside of the photo album I was making for you.

We drank too much of the summer sun in July

mama saidtoday i grew eight inches and three years in my mind, because i am sick of having so much to learn. you told me i was born yesterday, and i told you that made me a virgin. my mind is on fire and your hair feels like papyrus and my mind is on fire and my mind is on fire

a thousand words drew from my salivary glands and all of them found refuge around my gums, rotting cavities in my ivory-teeth and scaring away the tooth fairy, and you knew if they ever fell from my mouth you would curse me for dropping lines like alibis. into the ocean and i visit my old womb of torn seaweed and careening anemones, while starfish curse me and spit bad dreams

you'll suffer unto meI was a four-year-old fatherless pageant baby when Mother found the listing for Challenger. For weeks she complained about the California public school system. Said I wasn't fit for it, wasn't right for it. "We live in a shithole. Public school systems rely on money and the income in this area sucks. They're all hoodlums here. You'll get raped, mugged, killed, murdered and then what? All the I'm sorries in the world won't bring you back. I'm not letting that happen to you. You're getting a better foundation than I did at your age."

Mother always wanted the best for me, didn't care about the cost. She scoured the Yellow Pages for private scho

MotherAs you sweat over petunias,
I watch shadows
pour from chlorophyll branches.

You croon
when delphiniums bloom,
Heap praises
on your roses.

You tramp with shovels, rakes,
And garden hoes,
dancing in lime green galoshes,
to the passing tempo of July.

All while my minutes bunch
at the windowsill,
a half-done row of knitting
cast aside. I recollect my thread and leave
to forage for dinner in the kitchen.

memories, making glorious mudhis memories are making a glorious mud

i.

it is a lumberjack's wife whose veins are budding twigs,
arms feeble as every dried branch to soak a shining star.

it is her who bares such troubled wrists for oven mitts,
so ardently delivers her hoggish assembly some hulking bird
whose body cavity is crammed tight to the sphincter
with a spiced bread. instinctively, she goes for the knife.
there is some raucous applause as she serrates

its oiled, peppered and flightless skin and on
into its succulent chest meat as every spectator
dreams of flying. her blade burrows farther in
and under enough to dredge up a pinkish marrow,

where

path to dublin or somewhereThe path to Dublin is a devout nomad, wandering this way and that under the feet of a season sprinting off into a little town to smolder in the field or in the sky, to end a life turned over on its colder side. The path to Dublin is covered in dust. Sometimes it is disturbed by hooves crested with uncertain horseshoes or feet guided by a mind too shy to ask faith for directions.

Sometimes it remembers that the weight of the world once plodded above its head, curved its spine. Sometimes it just forgets and winds itself to the edge of a cliff where a lighthouse stands waving its yellow-sleeved arm in the distance, claiming to know where a road

To the VysehradTo the Vyšehrad, Prague (May 13th, 2008)

I left a sliver of myself adrift on the Vltava,
the mother river. Not a piece of my heart, no-
nothing so yielding or moveable as that.
A curve of rib perhaps, or the third digit
of my left little finger, the largest vertebrae
or the deep roots of my wisdom teeth.

I shed a bone-it slipped out from beneath
my skin in the late afternoon,
when the sun on the new, smooth headstones
covered my eyes with blindfolds
white and gold; it fell
into the foreign trailing arbutus
without a sound.

When the rain came, later, it rolled
with the black grave garden dirt
into the river and settled,

Browse More Like This

Download File
HTML, 697 bytes more ▶

More from ~e-bojnowski

ophthalmicophthalmic
e.bojnowski

I attempt to fuse myself
with a sooty wall,
as a harmonic sting tolls loudly
in a splintered , gold sky.

An instant of clarity aches in my sternum,
as I whisper into the stormy bellows-
oafish and fumbling across the well crafted letters.

A leafy shudder
with a similar pallor as your voice,
breathed and braided sky
into its iron-like timbre.

The eyes are
doll-like and sleepy -
with two red canyons ,
brazen beneath them.

View Gallery

Featured in Groups:

Not currently featured in any groups.

Details

Submitted: December 11, 2009
File Size: 697 bytes

Link

Thumb

Statistics

Comments: 21
Favourites: 92 [who?]
Views: 2,779 (0 today)
Downloads: 148 (0 today)

[x]

winter footnotes

by ~e-bojnowski, Dec 11, 2009, 11:26:34 PM
Literature / Poetry / Experimental / Surrealism

winter footnotes
e.bojnowski

your elbows were anchors
in a softly-lit parking lot,
where you sang to glass and paper:

and your visions are quiet hills
your visions are shy sounds
your visions are sheep covered in frost.

speaking
loose tongued,
like an old shoe-

that dry rasp
that leaves me covered in skin flakes,
leaves me
brushed onto the wall .

I am the raised bumps in spackle-
ripped off with the sound of a poor phonograph:

in my chain link home,
a residual ghost.

winter footnotesby ~e-bojnowski

Literature / Poetry / Experimental / Surrealism

update June 2,2010
first place???!?!?!?!?
[link]

this hurt really badly to type.
sorry if I have been inattentive-
my neck is injured and I can't sit at the computer for long.

Daily Deviation

Given 2010-06-13

winter footnotes by ~e-bojnowski. ( Featured by `fllnthblnk )

~projectilewordvomit Dec 5, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

The imagery in this is lovely... you could almost paint it.

~e-bojnowski Dec 9, 2012

thank you!

~vermilion--vermouth May 30, 2011

_{Beautifully written. Congratulations on the DD! *So late*}

~e-bojnowski Jun 4, 2011

thank you very much!

~vermilion--vermouth Jun 4, 2011

_{You're welcome.}

~fossilfuels Jul 16, 2010 Writer

this is incredible, wow

~e-bojnowski Jul 16, 2010

~Ghrey Jun 14, 2010 Student Writer

so so glad for you
i do love this one

"and your visions are quiet hills
your visions are shy sounds
your visions are sheep covered in frost.

~AnnaCecile Jun 14, 2010 Professional Photographer

You have wonderful imagery and a masterful way of punctuating. Congratulations on winning first place.

~oneofthose-rachels Jun 13, 2010

This is beautiful.
in my chain link home,
a residual ghost.

There's something captivating about your style -- it feels like looking between the lines and finding something precious and startling in the shadows underneath.
It's gorgeous. I had to feature you here: [link]

More from ~e-bojnowski

Featured in Groups:

Details

Statistics

winter footnotes

winter footnotesby ~e-bojnowski

Daily Deviation

The Journal Portal

Polls

What is your preferred drawing software?

deviantART [dee·vee·un'nt·ART]

Keep in Touch!

Deviousness

Add Media

Style