In this story, the train.
The problem with love?
It is love. A harness for perception.
I used a you. You used a me too.

Still they plume me back, these refrains.
Back to where?  Within.  There.
That water day  of     no        good     bye,
our signed decades of silence.
My blue note still sears,
scars your pocket.

Think of all those waves
that cracked the shore without us.
No. It is too early in the story.
We haven’t gotten to Paris, yet.
That too will come.

But I am not thinking of Paris.
Only this sudden heaviness
over my hip, burning deeper
into the seam.  What?  Another letter?

No, the I that claims itself,
a first-person phone, the taunt of key/
stroke, pass/code, voice/
mail, our answering/machine,

the easy blue of a speech balloon
marked delivered.
In this story,

How long do we wait?

Talon the whistle, un/sidle
the bolt.  Already the horizon
shivers with blindness,
electric in my oncoming ear.
 

Julie E. Bloemeke’s poetry manuscript, Slide to Unlock, was recently chosen by Stephen Dunn as a 2016 finalist for the May Swenson Poetry Award.  Her manuscript also placed as a semifinalist in six book prizes: the 2016 Crab Orchard Review Poetry Open Competition, the 2015 Hudson Prize through Black Lawrence Press, the 2016 and 2015 Washington Prize through the Word Works, and the 2014 and 2015 Crab Orchard Poetry Series First Book Award. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars and an upcoming 2016 fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications including Gulf Coast, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Drunken Boat, Poet Lore, The James Dickey Review, and Bridge Eight among others.   In May 2015 she won the ekphrastic poetry competition at the Toledo Museum of Art where her work was on view with the Claude Monet collection.