Blog | Bourgeon

Two Poems by Jacqueline Jules

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December 8, 2016

Avocado Secret

When the widow wrote
how her husband
once said she was like
a perfectly ripe avocado,
I wanted to rush right out
and buy one. Examine
its tough exterior,
creamy innards,
solid core.

Learn its secret.

At his bedside, I was
best described as a banana.
A fruit turning brown
and mushy too quickly.

Just like an avocado,
when sliced too late.

Except I had no pit
deep inside, stopping
the knife.

The Longest River

Baby Moses floated
down the Nile,
in a basket caulked
with bitumen and pitch,
carefully constructed
from a mother’s
calculated choice
to set her child adrift
amid crocodiles
rather than see him slain
before her eyes.

I think of Jochebed today
as I set you down among tall reeds
knowing you will float
to a fate beyond my grasp
in a wicker basket,
by no means watertight.

But clamping you against my breast
will not keep soldiers or crocodiles away.

So I stand aside as Miriam,
watching at a distance, hoping for a princess
to scoop you from the water with a kiss.

Jacqueline Jules is the author of the poetry chapbooks, Field Trip to the Museum (Finishing Line Press) and Stronger Than Cleopatra (ELJ Publications). Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Unrequited: An Anthology of Love Poems about Inanimate Objects, Inkwell, Killing the Angel, Soundings Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Gargoyle, Potomac Review, Imitation Fruit, Little Patuxent Review, The Broadkill Review, and Minimus. Visit her online at www.jacquelinejules.com where you will see that she is also the author of 35 books for young readers including the Zapato Power series and Feathers for Peacock.

Image by Jayan.thanal – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53316878

Two Poems by Megan Alpert

Poetry

Gregory Luce

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November 25, 2016

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Island

She would cry every time we put her in the carriage. That was all right, and the way I had to lean sideways to make her sleep. Her soft breath on my face. Smelled like waste. My back would heal and she would nurse. My nipples still blue when the sound of the ocean stopped. Sometimes the trees bend toward me and I’ll feel something like it. Or taste it just before. The gold dripping off the leaves, just before it sweetens and betrays.

Kahee and the Dark

In Xi’an I’d wake
in the dark, unable to find my hands.

Remember how we went for oranges?
We held them, sweet and tart, the only bright things
in the sudden fog.

Husks burned
at the edges of the fields.
We walked home without our feet.

Later, the notes of your flute drifted down the hall.
It spoke of a forest.
How you sing when you walk, not to lose yourself.

The song stopped and the dark
erased the room.

Megan Alpert‘s poetry has appeared in Quarterly West, Sixth Finch, Contrary, Harvard Review, and others. Her journalism has been published online by The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Guardian, and Foreign Policy, where she was a 2015-2016 fellow. She is the recipient of a reporting fellowship from the International Women’s Media Foundation in 2016 and an Orlando Poetry Prize from A Room of Her Own Foundation in 2011.

“Island” originally appeared in Denver Quarterly. “Kahee and the Dark” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Green Mountains Review.

From Let The Wind Push Us Across by Jane Schapiro

Gregory Luce

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November 11, 2016

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From <I>Let The Wind Push Us Across</i> by Jane Schapiro

Tent

Sometimes in the morning,

before opening my eyes,

I dream of our tent,

that tiny green dome.

From behind its walls

thin as skin, I hear birds,

leaves, a brush of wind.

I yearn for that waking,

that once tethered dawn when

unzipping the door

I leaned into the world.

Jane Schapiro is the author of a volume of poetry, Tapping This Stone (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 1995) and the nonfiction book, Inside a Class Action: The Holocaust and the Swiss Banks (University of Wisconsin, 2003), selected for the Notable Trials Library. Her chapbook Mrs. Cave’s House won the 2012 Sow’s Ear Poetry Chapbook competition. Her essays and poems have appeared in publications such as the American Book Review, The American Scholar, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Sun, and Yankee among others.

http://www.janeschapiro.com/

Photo by Shin-ichi Kumanomido.

I Want to Write About the N-Word by Alina Stefanescu

Poetry

Gregory Luce

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October 27, 2016

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I Want to Write About the N-Word by Alina Stefanescu

I want to write about nipples even though

no word is safe I write about nipples

because they make me uncomfortable

and the things I cannot touch

with my eyes look good in black ink.

Because black ink is a private part

I can hide behind a white wall and ask

why our nipples turn dark and moody while nursing

and all nipples turn the same shade of brown

but not blushing under exposure as if

color changes the social cue

unembarrassed and maybe fuck you.

I want to know why nipples feel foreign

thus darkened and why it’s dangerous.

I want to admit I’ve never seen the nipples

of a black nursing mother and my world

stays smaller as a result as a world without

color is a world without changes in nipples

so I speak about nipples for part of the planet

while all other sisters’ nipples remain

obscured from me. Other nipples.

I don’t want to Other nipples. I want

to acknowledge that nursing alters nipples,

the pink/tan/pert learns to undulate

whorls beyond the realm of seashells,

inexplicable curls and I want to write

about nipples like it’s natural

because nipples are natural and I am so much

socialization conditioned to fear the change

in body parts. To cover what grows un-young.

I’m sick and tired seeing the disproportionate appearance of

Anglo/American nipples at the expense of everyotherwoman.

We are sum-one. And yet—I cannot write about nipples because

no other flesh is cut from the same cloth. I can NOT

because they are different but I want to because

they are my mother’s. And I am my mother’s

daughter plus everyotherlivinggirlnipple

writing the shit we shouldn’t say.

Alina Stefanescu is the author of “Objects In Vases” (Anchor & Plume, 2016). She was born in Romania and lives in Alabama with her partner and four small mammals. Her flash fiction, “White Tennis Shoes”, won the 2015 Ryan R. Gibbs Fiction Award. Her poem, “Oscar Dees, No Apologetics Please,” from the chapbook Objects in Vases, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. You can read her syllables in current issues of PoemMemoirStory, Tinge Magazine, Jellyfish Review, The Zodiac Review, Parcel, Change Seven, and others. More online at www.alinastefanescu.com.

James Hampton, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (ca. 1950–1964) by Pamela Murray Winters

Gregory Luce

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October 13, 2016

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James Hampton, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (ca. 1950–1964) by Pamela Murray Winters

Tossing away sandwiches,

chewing gum, cigarettes,

he made his heaven from wrappers,

commerce’s carapace. Who would discard

the meat of the thing: shake out

the book and bow to

the empty jacket, feed on

Baggies and shells, expect

twenty-four blue robes to rise

and offer a requiem? Recall, then,

that this temple of trash was made

in a garage: a heavenly vehicle,

we, entering, fuel.

Pamela Murray Winters has had work published in the Gettysburg Review, Gargoyle, Beltway Poetry, and numerous other publications. She received an MFA in poetry from Vermont College in Fine Arts in 2015 and is presently gainfully unemployed. A native of Takoma Park, Maryland, Pam lives by the Chesapeake Bay, hates seafood, and doesn’t swim.