Dotted Line Dotted Line

Poetry Summer 2022    fiction    all issues

Cover of Poetry Summer 2022

whitespacefiller

Joanne Monte
Departure
& other poems

Holly York
Still When I Reach for the Leash
& other poems

Anne Marie Wells
Catholicism Still Lingers in a Concrete Poem
& other poems

D.T. Christensen
Coded Language
& other poems

Laura Faith
Ungodly
& other poems

Abigail F. Taylor
Winter in Choctaw
& other poems

Natalie LaFrance-Slack
Peace
& other poems

Nicole Sellino
iii. moving, an interruption
& other poems

Gilaine Fiezmont
In Memoriam / Day of the Dead
& other poems

Sheri Flowers Anderson
On Being A Widow
& other poems

RJ Gryder
Felling
& other poems

William S. Barnes
to hatch
& other poems

Suzannah Van Gelder
Idolatry
& other poems

Sam Bible-Sullivan
The Dying Worker’s Soliloquy
& other poems

Hills Snyder
Eclipse (July 4, 2020)
& other poems

Lauren Fulton
Birth Marks
& other poems

David Sloan
Prostrate
& other poems

Nancy Kangas
Dry Dock Cranes of Brooklyn Navy Yard
& other poems

Noreen Graf
In Attendance
& other poems

Jim Bohen
Nothing Tea
& other poems

Thomas Baranski
Let us name him dread and look forward
& other poems


Writer's Site

Jim Bohen

When you leave . . .

a persona poem after Kris Bigalk


Take all your expired prescriptions,

especially those that kept you up.


Take your torn tennis shoes—the ones you

couldn’t bear to throw out. I’ll bear it. Trust me.


Take the expression you always used

whenever I “embarrassed you.”


Take what you hid under the bed—I won’t sweep

or touch or grab whatever’s lurking there.


Take the faded jacket you stitched with male

shrugs, embroidered with smirks whenever I asked

why you didn’t give it away.


Take the male pronouncements I wasn’t to have

an opinion on. (You’ll need a bag that’s very large.

Women have no clue, right?)


Take the stack of magazines—you said you only

kept the ones that were just “to die for.”

Since I won’t be dying any time soon,

get the whole stack out of here.


And be sure to take the care you sewed

into the fabric of what we had. Baby socks

that do not match are all that anyone could knit

from those pathetic shreds.



Nothing Tea

Pour nothing

into empty cups.

Drink pretend all up.

Make sure to make

a lot of noise

with mouth and spoon.

Slurping? Highly


recommended.

As are scraping and

banging your saucer


with your plastic toy cup.

Why do all this—

and even more?

For the prize you seek.

And nothing tea

is a perfect way to bring


its warmth to you.

Jim Bohen is a poet/songwriter from St. Paul, MN. His poems have appeared in the Minnesota Daily, Big City Lit, Talking Stick and elsewhere. He’s been short-listed three times for the international erbacce prize. Unsolicited Press published his poetry collection, “I travel in rusting burned-out sedans,” in 2018 and will publish another in 2024. Jim and his wife Bonnie have two adult children and do daycare for their two granddaughters.

Dotted Line