The Other Version of Eden
Lovers' Reunion at the Univerity of Arkansas
My Daughter Tells Me Green Is the Color
The humans wanted answers so I invented
some: In the beginning, there was hydrogen.
I aired the planets up and strung the sky
with strips of twinkle lights. I poured the dark
into the day and let there be night.
A day was like a thousand years and then
one passed. They saw how slight my sleight-of-hand
had been—the moon a pie pan on a pulley,
the birds just feathers fastened to a line.
They faulted one another for this deception,
wondered if they were even married. I ordered
them to the wilds to fix for their failing marriage:
She’d pull him to her private garden and strip
the apple down. Together they would share it.
Lovers' Reunion at the University of Arkansas
Sometimes Fayetteville lives in me
a moment longer when you mute
the room with your walk. Tonight,
each step is a slender syllable
through history’s winter, where after
wine and weed, you tug
your blouse toward heaven and rise
in me a language like God’s original.
Your waistband brailles a love letter
around the brim of your body. My fingers
fade into the flesh of translation. Oh, the words
your ribs rub out of bones. I revise
you over and over with soft sentences.
A hundred times we make noises
like love in the hills above Old Main,
love so loud we startle the snow awake.
My Daughter Tells Me Green Is the Color
of God. Without it, we’d have to lie down
in aqua pastures. She’s reading a book
about Crayola’s obscurest colors: English
Vermillion, Permanent Geranium Lake,
the changing landscape of American
palettes. She claims its thesis is our dreams
dull each time we reach for them,
the crayon the metaphor for tools to fill
the empty spaces in lives we envision.
Each picture pinched under a refrigerator magnet
makes us a minor god in lower paradise.
She edges her finger over the box’s every row,
quizzes me on every color. When rain
threatens, we fuss over a fresh pack.
Magenta—always the wallflower, Fuchsia,
so cold.
Ash Bowen’s poems have appeared in New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Verse Daily, as well as in his first full-length collection, The Even Years of Marriage (winner of the Orphic Prize). His current manuscript has been a finalist for the 2020 Crab Orchard Series Poetry Prize and 2020 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Prize. He lives in Colón, Mexico.
