Julia Bouwsma

Letters were once bodies, are bodies now

could be the first line of my father’s eulogy, if he were dead.
Calligrapher, madman: letters licked seriffed tongues of flame into his head. 

I lick old mad tongues to flame, let unsent letters pile up inside my head.
Each blank sheet tells me another memory I can’t trust.

Each blank sheet allows me to tell another memory I can’t trust.
I can grasp each stroke, he said. Shape it in space like a sculpture.

            A child, I could not grasp his strokes. I let him shape me like a sculpture.
            Ink pooled like demons, my unsteady hand. Still I filled the page. 

What demons will I unsteady into this poem? Still I pool the page
unkempt and smudged, inking out between the lines.

My father—unkempt, smudged—inks his face with lines,
commands each day holy with his mouth of crushed boulder.

Thou shalt, a command he crushes into my mouth. Still I rise bolder.
This could be the first line of my father’s eulogy, if he were dead.

Note: The title line is by Natalie Diaz, as quoted from an interview in The Creative Independent, 2017. The form is a duplex, invented by Jericho Brown.

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Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, farmer, freelance editor, critic and small-town librarian. She is the author of two poetry collections: Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). She is the recipient of the 2018 Maine Literary Award; the 2016-17 Poets Out Loud Prize, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver; and the 2015 Cider Press Review Book Award, selected by Linda Pastan. Her poems and book reviews can be found in Grist, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, River Styx and other journals. A former Managing Editor for Alice James Books, Bouwsma currently serves as Book Review Editor for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact and as Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, Maine.