Amy Lowell Prize Honorable Mention, selected by Dzvinia Orlowsky
To ESOL Instructors: For Their Safety — You Will Refer to Domestic Abuse Survivors By Flower Names
Yarrow blushed, oh, oh’d in a basement
garden of sorts: fluorescence,
heat, dampness, rows of
growing things, where flowers might
linger a few hours to correct
lapses in the past, or perhaps practice
to be in present tense. That
class, bright, if rather bare, bordered
with laminate tables and folding chairs; a baby
often slept in a stroller, after lurching on subway,
bus, bus, sidewalks ice rutted, down
an elevator creaking vowels, to where
her mother read: I was in the jar aloud, though
her book said yard. As the others, she
labored to learn y and remember
a plosive sound often followed
one liquid and soft. Still, that
garden burbled with lexical
hums and murmurs, an occasional
laugh, and that afternoon, an instructor paraded
a tiered red white and blue
marvel for a break that wasn’t
just a break but a celebration. Buddleia
stood first, salsa-d a bit in her snow
boots. Bee Balm belted: Oh,
say, can you see. Then Tulip put
her thumb and finger between two
lips and blew — the baby howled, the flowers
whooped and clapped for the waking
and for Yarrow, her citizenship and our
land that one day will blossom again.
Barbara Boches’ poems have been published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Poet Lore, Solstice, SWWIM Every Day, upstreet, and other literary magazines. Another appeared in The Griffin Museum of Photography in In Your Mother Tongue: Image and Word Dialogue. She resides in Brookline, Massachusetts with her husband, Edward.