Terry Hall Bodine | The Something We Make from Nothing

The Something We Make from Nothing: poems by Terry Hall Bodine. Number 4 in our A.V. Christie Series.

[ image courtesy of Patty Paine’s Negative Recovery Project ]

Publication:  February 25, 2024 [100 copies]
19 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-15-0
$ 12.00

Terry Hall Bodine is a graduate of the College of William & Mary in Virginia. Her work appears in Broad River Review, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Lone Mountain Literary Society, Pine Row Press, and The Southern Poetry Anthology IX: Virginia from The Texas Review Press. Her manuscript Neither Are Crows was selected as a semi-finalist for the Blue Lynx Prize in 2020 and the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in 2021, and was one of eight finalists for the 2022 Concrete Wolf Louis Award. Terry lives in Lynchburg with her husband, Bill, and works with academic advising at the University of Lynchburg.

Reef

The shade pasted with pictures from Look
magazine stays drawn; it ticks against
the window frame, unsettled by the fan.
A washrag blankets Mama’s eyes. Cracked
like the spine of a paperback book, she loses
things she meant to do, her unbound thoughts
disordered. I gently close her bedroom door
to dull the sound of weeping.

Beneath the outside spigot Avis bathes as best
she can; I wipe her down but she stains brown
as summer’s deadened end. Cross-legged
on the concrete stoop, I spread stale bread
with potted ham, our splayed knees makeshift plates.
My sister, ever poised for flight, is like a kite
without a tail; she’ll never leave this nest
she’s unaware that she is making.

When picking my name, Mama fixed on the fuzz
that blushed my wrinkled head, its color
just the coral of the polish on her nails.
I feel, instead, akin to pink invertebrates
cemented where they’re bred, polyps
clustered hopelessly like kinks of chain-link
fence. I am rusting underwater:
I cannot swim; I cannot drown.

[ thanks to the editors of Litmosphere for first publishing this poem ]