​People Also Ask

By Leanne Boschman

​Is poetry really the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits?
What kind of biscuits?
Can these biscuits be frozen?
I have a small family and we only use three or four biscuits at a time.
What equipment do I need for bird watching?
Do birds somehow know when they’re becoming extinct?
Does anyone have a knitting pattern for a sweater with an image of Stonehenge?
Is it necessary to use Seville oranges to make marmalade?
Will I ever visit Seville?
What kind of glue should we use for wallpaper?
We live in a tiny tinder box and are thinking of repapering the bedroom.
Is it true that looking at pictures of people hugging can be a substitute
for actual hugging?
Is it okay to hug if we use a plastic barrier sheet with arms wrapped
in cellophane and duct tape?
Will this traumatize our grandchildren?
What are you supposed to think about when meditating?
How can I tell if I did the meditation correctly?
What is the difference between gentle rejuvenation and mild hysteria?
What’s causing this pain on my left side that moves to the right
and sometimes engulfs my entire chest?
Am I okay?
I dreamt that I was watching my own dreams at a drive-in theatre,
dead birds with pins stuck in them falling around me, the spherical wailing
of saws coming through the speakers.
Is there someone there—a benevolent gardener where we sow our questions
in the plastic plots of our computer screens, someone who blesses our fallen
loaf of bread, toenail fungus, offer to deliver groceries?
If so, will you drive by my house?
Please don’t honk, just wave and wait to see if I wave back.


*The quotation “Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits”
from Carl Sandberg’s poem Good Morning America

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​Magic Lantern

By Leanne Boschman

This man sitting beside me
at the New Year’s party
is learning Korean.
He shows me the characters
for earth and heaven
on the cell phone he cradles
like a magic lantern
in the palm of his hand,
then, genie-like, slips
inside a ninja village,
bounds across terra cotta
roof tiles, cartwheels down
a narrow lane.
Should I tell him that
I sometimes disappear
in a crowd when the trace
of a poem lures
me away?
Would he join me in sampling
overheard words
like bonbons
from a Venetian bowl?
Perhaps we could muse
on how this glass globe
on a window-ledge
filled with vertebra
of small sea creatures,
or two budgies
that the host’s children
have named Cake and Dolphin
could all find their way
into a stanza.
Later, on the balcony,
emboldened
by an incandescent
night sky,
we could flail
at this piñata moon
to see what other
metaphors might
spill out.

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​How We Conjure

By Leanne Boschman

i.
Years after her death, Marthe still
insinuates herself into the corners
of Bonnard’s paintings;
impossible to refuse
her pink-violet presence
beside table, vase of peonies,
morning bath drawn,
toss of a floral dressing gown.
The tilt of her head just so.
Endless days indisposed,
the arguments; here is the sharp
snout of her lapdog
and, of course, Marthe--
the nude phantom splayed
scissors of her legs.
Here are shriveled
plum pits
next to flushed ripe peaches.
This is an art
history lesson on how we conjure
our dead.

ii.
Anything can be a dip pen,
ink in clear flint glass, amber,
or aqua. The past,
stippled onto a day
when ferry slides closer to island.
Your parents’ graves there.
Smudge of shoreline trees.
How you are grateful to slip through
fog and for this new way
of embracing.
Walking in front of you a man
his bare, hairless head
and for a moment
he is your brother at twenty-six
the chemo finally
finished.
No, this is not the same
as remembering, this
pall of dusk and dried
funeral flowers
that open fresh
in every season.                         

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Leanne Boschman’s poetry has been published in Geist Magazine, Prism, Other Voices, Dandelion Magazine, Room, Arc Poetry, and Grain Magazine. As well, her poems have been published in several anthologies. Her collection Precipitous Signs: A Rain Journal was published by Leaf Press in 2009; in it she explores colonial narratives of settlement and the lived experience of women in labour markets and domestic settings. She is a co-artistic director of the Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series and Collective.