Jill Peláez Baumgaertner

Bodiless

• You leave your signature like the atom
• whose footprint is its only proof,
• the pencil’s sharp point indenting
• the paper next to my poems’
• lines. With what voice
• you have uncovered my concealed
• intentions, presented my images
• in bas-relief, and textures
• I could not see until your hand
• revealed the design — just as I mark
• the pages of your book of poems —
• a blade of grass, a faded ribbon,
• a pressed leaf, a leather strip.
• In the solitude of this house
• I read your words aloud printing the air
• with them. Like fragrance
• the atoms dance,
• disperse, escape,
• as light as flight.
• I roam through rooms of them.

Permanent Address: 1956

• The leaves slick with rain from the afternoon storm,
• the small, tough leaves mixed with grass clippings
• for my doll’s salad, her tea laid behind the side hedge.

• The tiny cherries ridged like pumpkins, sour,
• the pits almost as big as the fruit, the juice sticky
• on my hands, dripping down my wrists, the pits
• a small pile in the grass mixed with dirt and ants.

• Grandma’s anger flaring indoors, her apron thrown down.
• The continual drone of mosquitoes seeking flesh,
• and giant orange grasshoppers, poison-spitters, Grandpa says,
• as he bends over his sprouting pineapple growing at
• the back door, his coffee always warming on the stove,
• ready for his back porch newspaper and his cigar.
• His silence when Grandma slams the door.

• I fit myself into corners of the outdoors, I wedge
• into interstices, find freedom in small places,
• the games more challenging the smaller the playing field,
• the games unshackling blood bonds to anger foaming and burnt.

What Cannot Be Fixed

My Father's Bones

Jill Peláez Baumgaertner is professor of English and dean of Humanities and Theological Studies at Wheaton College. She received a PhD from Emory University and has taught at Valparaiso University.

Flannery O'Connor:
A Proper Scaring

The author of five collections of poetry — including What Cannot Be Fixed, a textbook on poetry, a book on Flannery O’Connor, and the poetry anthology Imago Dei — she has also written lyrics for compositions by Richard Hillert, Carl Schalk, Michael Costello, and Daniel Kellogg. She received a Fulbright to Spain and has won many awards for her poetry. She serves as poetry editor of The Christian Century.