Poetry by Nathalie Boisard-Beudin

Current Issue

November 2012

“the literary magazine for the rest of us”

your words, your way

The End of the Day

by Nathalie Boisard-Beudin

A naked bulb pulsates, a pain in your left eye,

Its shade long gone the way love goes

Shards and teeth sprinkled over the floor

The window is broken but no air comes in.

There is love in the bitterness that you swallow

It is love still when spewed in the toilet

You are gasping for words.

Taking a deep breath, lungs shaking

You wonder your hearts still beats

Gutted fish flipping on a kitchen counter

It has just forgotten why.

There is love flowing down your cut arms

Love seeping in the tears stained carpet

You’ve just forgotten why.

Growing Away

by Nathalie Boisard-Beudin

What nourished, nurtured us

Kindled and stoke our passion

Has gone stale, flaky, and unstable

The so-called milk of human kindness

Going off with the faint rancid whiff

Of a long forecast disaster.

Hands flailing, grasping at teats,

Barren moorings gone papery with age

We struggle in vain in the dark

Every sign of romance curdled,

Soured milk residue drying on our lips.

Smiles freeze, seized by ageing dry rot

Over a hasty coagulation of sentiments

We forget maternal love and drift

Brain cells trying to process the events

Analyse and reconstruct the riff

This story of sweetness gone mouldy.

• • •

Nathalie Boisard-Beudin is a middle aged French woman living in Rome, Italy. She has more hobbies than spare time, alas - reading, cooking, writing, painting and photography - so hopes that her technical colleagues at the European Space Agency will soon come up with a solution to that problem by stretching the fabric of time. Either that or send her up to write about the travels and trials of the International Space Station, the way this was done for the exploratory missions of old. Clearly, the woman is a dreamer. http://wordofthedayfreshfresh.blogspot.com/