Souvenir

A Journal

"I'm going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There's something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave".----Breece D'J Pancake, in a letter to his mother. 

Jerrod Bohn


sun-clot afternoon. A bandage fell
where I stopped reading memorization
of sequence if the ant steps I will
crush & flush so much red light
contained beneath skin. Subtext is
what inches its way across floors
are you understanding or should I
explain how bread crumbs have lost
absorbency those unread pages seep
we carry ten times our weight we can
never recall. Evening denotes a suture
we can name what was said the surface
do you know evening connotes disjunction
I remember poisoning the colony
wasn’t plot but some other mound in
scabs we seek relations. Sorry I forgot






a film appears over the projection screen
your body in mine—an ark. My father
used to hold me & sing the world into
being. Little baby elephants in his hands
half-mad wolves in pairs in pours
entire earth made flesh the word
he whispered to the orb breathing in
his aftershave. My mother made
few covenants. Your fingers fewer
project familial promises floating
like cork pieces your mother’s whine.
I ignored those sounds you didn’t say
sleeping those oaths in distances between
our body tossed on waves broken on
sures. Vow to always be I am
not my father I have no thumbs
cannot stop the flood or carry you
above water. Projecting



Jerrod E. Bohn finished his MFA in Poetry at Colorado State University in May 2010. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Phoebe, The Montreal Review, Word For/Word, Zouch, alice blue and other journals. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado where he teaches English at CSU and yoga at the CSU rec center and works part-time at a bicycle shop/coffee shop/beer bar.