• Home
  • Poetry
  • Archives
  • Past Events
    • Fall | 2012 Reading
    • Spring | 2013 Reading
    • Spring | 2014 Reading
    • Fall | 2015 Reading
    • Gallery
  • Submissions
    • General Submissions
    • The Paris-American Prize
  • About/Contact
  • Support
  • Home
  • Poetry
  • Archives
  • Past Events
    • Fall | 2012 Reading
    • Spring | 2013 Reading
    • Spring | 2014 Reading
    • Fall | 2015 Reading
    • Gallery
  • Submissions
    • General Submissions
    • The Paris-American Prize
  • About/Contact
  • Support

Three poems by BETH BACHMANN

(sugar)

Destroy it         so the body       can breathe.        I asked

for water          and you let go   the wheel.          There’s never

enough power  to flood the field or drive            the blood into   
 
its cage. It’s impossible to read the ruins without the missing 
  
part –    Bring the bones to be burned.    The flesh has too many holes. 
  
Ruined,              we say, of the fruit        when it is all juice, of the body, 
 
of the bed           sheets, of the word we cannot say         alone.   



25   The Paris-American

(salt)

The snow needs more                                          
                                        to oil

its throat into song. The birds
are gone 
                  and the deer are greedy,

eager to cauterize.
                                    Slip me

a hinge. My hands are tied
like blackened flies. My fingers: hackle and feather.

Rock, rock, quiet water, rock. What rhymes
with rose

-flushed glass? The sun’s a blood-bath.



26   The Paris-American

(landscape: hyperventilation)

You or I or the air says deeper: breathe; the brain            needs blood. Mountain-sick, the moon 

comes nearer, giving in. More    blood? Isn’t it full? Where to put the mountain in relation to

the shadow, the human, the hunt, the hole in the fence?              Almanac says, if there is no death 

in five days, there will be            water. What for, if not to smother or wash out a mouth

before it enters silent?    Moon, moon, keep moving        your fingers and they become a wheel 

beneath the tiny legs of the stonefly. Moon opening, moon closing,          nymph skin crawling over

the riverbed, you like to say it    first. In the mountains, it’s easy to get caught     watching 
 
something you shouldn’t. It doesn’t hurt the snow.




27   The Paris-American

Picture
Beth Bachmann is the author of Temper (Pitt Poetry Series, 2009), winner of the AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her new manuscript won the 2011 Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for a book in progress. Find her at  www.bethbachmann.com

  The Paris-American
  Copyright © 2022 The
Paris-American
   About • Contact • Submit • Archives • Support