Robert Bohm was born in Queens, NY. He is a poet who also writes non-fiction. His most recent poetry book (a chapbook) is Uz Um War Moan Ode from Pudding House Publications, 2007. Other credits include two books, another chapbook, and work published in a variety of print and online publications. Two essays about looking at poetry and culture from an outsider perspective are currently available online. They are "Ignoring the Cops at the Burial Ground" which is at Pemmican and "Eating It All: Empathy, Thematic Range & Antiwar Poetry" at The November 3rd Club. He has a number of manuscripts for which he's in search of a publisher. He's also been a sporadic graffitist over the years, producing decals (poetry plus graffics) that he sticks in public places.
Robert Bohm's Blog: http://robertbohm/blog
Selections from Online Works, 2006-2009
Starting at Six
While Skinner’s looms aged
in the carpetmill, Von Schlichten played piano
in the church basement. Scurrying along
the baseboard, a mouse, like Jesus’ mind
on a telepathic mission, disappeared into a hole
that would have made the prophets hold their noses.
The pastor’s mustache-ends, falling toward
the cock he pretended not to have, didn’t brush
dandruff from the mouse’s back
or the cracker crumbs from his own lapels.
Seated on a folding chair, all that mattered
to me were the notes, inside of which
the Hudson echoed as grandpa trudged home
from the Otis factory in the cold. Soon someone barged
into the basement screaming, “It’s horrible . . .”
Later that night, it snowed, but it wasn’t
the cold that made people shiver, it was
the Cutillo girl’s silence after the drunk
from the Uniontown beer parlor raped her, then
slit her throat.
Years later, not far away, one night a black limo
pulled over to the curb under the El in Queens
near the 59th St. Bridge. “Shit,” I thought, at 19 not liking
no’s no matter how they arrived. Quickly, as if dislodging
a dead root from dirt, Joyce yanked my hand
from between her legs in the hardware store doorway and started
combing her hair, as if nothing had been going on.
But the driver didn’t look, just put something in the glove compartment, then left again.
A few days afterwards, having found the illusionary
zen of things, I ended up in Jersey, north
of Closter Landing, gazing down
at the river from the Palisades, close to where, according
to my dad, in 1938 a rockslide buried
both the shore path and waterline
so all the boundaries
between safety and drowning disappeared.
Arbitrary Gateway to What Was Left . . . 1966
The hurled egg dripped down the kitchen wall.
Yusef thudded into the other room howling
“You asshole!”
I woke up on a bench, remembering this.
Nearby was a gutter flower: scrawny
stem with a battered head of small white petals.
Never before had I glimpsed so clearly
the meaninglessness of ugly and pretty.
Later I ate a cruller at a food joint’s counter on 34th.
Scottie the barmaid from Topp’s said nothing,
hunched in a booth biting her nails,
coffee growing old.
I needed a new place to live.
In the interim, I figured, at least I wouldn’t get any phone calls
from my old man about going to see
Dr. Rab in the Front St. clinic
where someone snuck in a dead cat
and nailed the carcass to the wall.
Sometimes when, north of Hell Gate’s stone towers, I tried
like Socrates in search of being’s rhythm
to stick my dick in Joyce, I missed and ended up
on the East River’s other side,
sucking clams off the half-shell in a wharf bar I hadn’t seen before.
Where did my cruller go?
Scottie was gone now too.
Pie slices in the glassed-in case soared upward
as I fell off the stool.
Why I puked blood I’ll never know.
When I came to, Mel the owner
was stroking my hair
while Scottie, who’d returned,
wiped my mouth with a rag.
Note to O’Carroll
I didn’t need a book or map maker
to get there.
The club at the alley’s end
and the pierced-lip woman
huddled on the stoop
were where they should be.
Her eyes as unambiguous
as a bear print in the Farmington woods
near the old battlefield,
I gave her
my heart’s address: first bench
on Foglietta Plaza by the river.
The newspaper: a murder on the front page,
a rape on the next. I want
to be victimized too, but differently:
my fingers chopped off at the bottom knuckle so I can write
without them getting in the way.
Voices pour through me.
The pierced-lip woman smiles
at leaves blowing into the alley
from a tree she can’t see.
Improv Meatbeating Neo-Fire Sutra Circa 1958
Staring in the mirror, I disappeared
through the door behind me, went
to the hall window and stood, hands on sill,
staring down at a woman who didn’t
look up at me. Like
the fresh roll my uncle kept
as a snack on his shed workbench
on a rocky
North Yonkers slope, her belly, I thought,
would taste wholesome when I kissed it, which it did
in my mind then while I soaped my aching cock
as she finally noticed me, her eyes disguised
as my own eyes staring back at me from the mirror
into which I gazed as I came in my hand, thinking
first of the belly, then her sodden pussy and afterwards
of bees buzzing in the sunflower patch
near where a flour mill once stood
a few miles north of the apartment years before
I was born. Already everything was real
to me but not real enough. Anna, the mixed-
race woman who Mr. Salisbury
dragged to death behind his horse 200 years ago, sang
me a lullaby one night after I heard about her
in a story my father told. Hot
like Eartha Kitt, she pulled
my cock until I came. Everything
was happening at once. Far west
of the river, way beyond
where the quarries once were,
stretches of land with children’s bodies buried in them
were blocked from view by corn stalks taller
than any you’ve ever seen. Now as then
sun-blood on hills at day’s end
burns a smoking road for us. Walk it. In
the sutra that you chant, be the flames
that roar. Listen
behind the apartment building
where you grew up
to the sound of soot settling
on everything.
Solace
I crossed Columbus Blvd.
then walked along the river. There was no need
not too, I didn’t have to wash myself
where the dogshit floated by.
The water's
dark swirl, Jesus's
toothless universe of a mouth
in which no word sounds
distinct from another.
Intertwined with early evening,
something calls me.
A chain link fence?
OD'd Jimmy's lost guitar?
That day long ago when Judy’s open hair
was a wind-battered thicket in a snowstorm?
Pigeons roam the sidewalk, hunting
the one crumb in which resides
the key to pigeon heaven.
How did the condom, hooked
on the public litter-basket's rim, get there?
And look at the crumpled cup
in the gutter. A bit of undrunk shake
slides from it, the ooze left
from another century's sonnets.
The soup factory across the river, closed.
How many people don't have work now?
The mayor's being sued for graft.
A bad-assed bearded man once walked
somewhere over there, looking
for huckleberries. Do you
fucking care?
This is where I live,
where I seek solace
when my lover disappears.
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