Making Lemonade Out of Lemons

A couple of poems did come into being after I'd been in writer's block for months while I grieved the death of my mother. This is one of two poems my book Sightlines contains from that time. See if you can figure out what strategies worked. All I think you need to know is that an 'Apostrophe' is a particular kind of poem. It speaks to an absent beloved.

Apostrophe

All night I call you––poem! You never come.

I holler over the porch rail, tap the can edge

with a fork, but you pare down like a dark moon

ghosting in the sky, flare out like a brittle match.

You are nowhere I expect you, or anywhere,

mislaid. Will you hatch like wasp larva, to gnaw

entrails, emerge when your host finally dies?

There is no arousing you. I expect to see you

up and dressed, stiff upper lip on your sassy mug.

Or dawdling, careless, books' clear margins

scuffed with your footprints for me to follow

the way I traced you last in the dark webs

of my mother's wrists, and lost your trail

in the purple lake of her forearm, isthmus

of her elbow, the white sheet erasing you both.

-Megan Bohigian, from Sightlines, published by Tourane Poetry Press in 2013