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the poet
Julieanne Larick is a poet and editor from Northeast Ohio. She edits poetry for GASHER Press, prose for jmww Journal, and manages social media for The Dodge. Her poems have appeared in Passengers Journal, Eunoia Review, and Kissing Dynamite. She is currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript on her family mythos and the environment, and loves Charles Simic.
the poems
Oranges
Our family comes from pilgrims,
my mother tells me at dinner.
They were pilgrims weeping into the river,
in flight they wept in memory
frothing with rain and drinking up
the oranges baka received for Christmas,
squelching with sour juice and sun.
My mom asks if baka would want
to read this about her family.
Baka grew up too quickly; she watched as pilgrims
left iron shoes in the swirling disturbances of the Danube,
her father, the wine-dipping man,
sinking like the orange in water, an O on his lips.
Yes, she would want to read about those years on the Danube,
those rainfalls and sun showers,
the stinging grief on our eyelids,
net of slain fruit in our palms.
Previously published as Pomorandža
A Common Phrase I Hate
If a tree falls in the forest, it didn’t really happen
if our bodies aren’t crushed by the force.
If the deer dies silently by the lake,
if no one lingers behind while I tie my shoe,
if no one finds our bodies together, sewn up
by the earth’s moss, green fingers drawing us further
away from the people who knew us.
Did we ever live or die, did we ever love?
If I scorch my fingertips and no one notices the burn,
it didn’t really happen since the world keeps spinning
outside the scars of my hands. Around and around and around
until all the people I know wrinkle from a million little pleasures.
I told a stranger I loved her outfit in a Tesco while I was
buying six cans of gin fizzes. She wore
a pink button down and said it was her boyfriend’s. She smiled;
the first time a stranger smiled at me since I turned 19.
If we both loved each other but never said a word,
did it really happen?
Previously published as Elegy to Lying
Home
I take I-71 home from college, unpack
all the stuff I collected over the year.
Return my favourite sweater to Nebraska
and migrate the bird necklace
to the last man who loved me.
I leave parties at 7 and spit out drinks, return cigarettes.
I unwrite lots of essays about Donne and Wordsworth,
uncheck books from the growing reading list.
My dad takes back his apologies.
I absorb salt in my eyes, rub dirt on my skin, abandon
old friends before loving them again. Unlearn their names.
I turn 18, then 17, then 16, then 15,
I ruin a birthday party for my sister then
go back to the hospital
where they drain my body of fluids
and I watch my heart beat faster and slower and I spit
the water and all the pills back
to where they came from.
I erase the note saying why I wanted to die,
that I sense my hometown turn its back on me.
Leaves cough up orange and blacken in bloom,
back to their own loving mothers.
Previously published as Warm Creature
Publishing credits
Oranges: Perhappened Magazine (Issue No. 9)
A Common Phrase I Hate: Passengers Magazine
(Vol 4, Issue No. 2)
Home: Passengers Magazine (Vol. 4, Issue No. 2)