Tocsin and Ode to Ex-boyfriends

Blythe Boyer

Tocsin   The autumn starts, and winter’s soon to come. The aging colors blood each bush, each tree will vein its leaves to gold. The drum of time and cold beats on, and plays for me the thrum of passing spells. To ring the bells – of birth, of growing up, of spreading out – will sound our days out loud. And when life tells us to, we’ll stop, all tolled. We know how to measure days and space, record the low sweet music rounding notes in sharp relief.  But listen to it now, because the snow will cover us. The autumn is so brief. We may get lost in chorus or in rifts; we’ll dance before we’re covered in the drifts.

Ode to Ex-boyfriends   I. It’s impossible to rhapsodize a grabby boy who fumbled me through a syllabus of nuts and bolts, who broke my lollipop defense, or one who smoked a spliff on the toilet while I rinsed splotches from my underwear. They all made that flip-flop in my belly, at first. And there were days in the park.   II. Sometimes a lack of function serves its own cocktail with a twist, sour to undo the illusion of love. Doors creaked between us. You’d sing on one side, cooking for an audience of dishtowels and spatulas, slapping them down for applause. We made love as the fan whirred, the sound whispered like our breathing.   III. Over break we ate Thanksgiving leftovers, your dad’s stuffing and your mom’s pills, sloshed on your waterbed for five slow days. Your head bobbed like a party balloon, a swollen red untethered, then deflating into a wrinkled rubber sack. You clutched me all the way back to school.

 

Blythe Boyer lives and writes in Philadelphia, PA. She likes to gather the emotional and historical content that we might otherwise discard—lost pieces of our daily lives—and find a way to puzzle it all together. Her poetry has appeared in Chronogram, and she is working on her MFA from Rosemont College.

Photo "Rocky Snow" by Bella Dante.

 

 

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Poems Copyright © 2006 Blythe Boyer. All rights reserved.

Photo Copyright © 2006 Bella Dante.  All rights reserved.