After My ‘Friend’ Bitched About the New Home
I Inherited from Auntie
I understand your vitriol, dear friend.
But just because I have the beams you coveted,
the bougainvillea you always wanted
as well as the books you borrowed and generally
‘forgot’ to give back, don’t look so green.
Green does not become you.
As you well know, I collected art
over time, whenever I had saved enough
to give myself a gift.
Do you remember the small Mary Fedden
we found together in Camden Lock Market?
I now happen to have the money to frame them,
I now have the walls to hang them.
Soon we’ll be having very cold beers on my porch—
think of droplets slowly rolling from the cold
glass—
under the red and white striped awning
to protect us from the fierce Spanish sun,
dip into the pool, sharing the fruits
of this unexpected windfall.
I am not sorry that I won’t see you there.
There is so much more to friendship
than a house. Remember when you seemed
happy in my little attic and the two blue, single
beds in the alcoves, the small stove
in the entrance, a sink by the front door?
You used to come to take a ‘holiday from marriage’,
and, even then, you envied me.
Four Mutts Having 3,000
Square Meters of Freedom
And they can’t
keep still.
Slobbering, open
mouthed, easy of limb,
they run. And
then they run—
from peach tree
to apple tree, from wire fence
to vines, from
honeysuckle to willow,
from pool to
garden shed.
And then the run
some more.
And then they
come for approval,
for a hug, for a
bone, for a bowl,
for a moment of
contemplation,
before they run.
Again.
Donner, Gustavo,
and Maxi:
a brown, a grey,
and a black wooosh,
their mouths
open, showing what they could do
if they wanted
to, their tails steering,
they don’t know
where they are expected
to be in such a
hurry.
Only Laika, the
German Shepherd, can’t quite
keep up anymore
with the young hooligans.
She’s an elderly
lady of distinction, of arthritis,
of sleeping
under the honeysuckle hedge on icy ground.
She was homeless
until she found us,
doesn’t know
what to do with a bed.
But we saw her
once, ambling with an exotic friend
through the
fields with a handsome,
sexy, gorgeous
fox.
Never underrate
old ladies.
Storm Alert in London
The Radio: Severe
thunderstorms will occur within 10 km of any point.
Whatever that
means.
Still, we were
warned.
It didn’t come
suddenly, but we didn’t believe.
It had never
happened before.
Somewhere in the
Caribbean perhaps,
not to us.
It had been
raining for days.
When the storm
broke,
the oldest, most
solid chestnut trees
in Hyde Park
were pulled from the wet ground
like matchsticks,
roots helplessly pointing
to the black
sky.
They died in a
dirty-green mass grave.
We saw it all on
TV before the power went.
At the front of
our house the cherry tree
was stopped by
the streetlight, or the tree
would have
entered our bedroom windows
like an
old-fashioned battering ram.
At the back the
drains were overflowing,
and
unmentionables rushed as in a small river
down the garden
path towards the yet
untamed clump of
Japanese knotweed.
When we finally
raised our heads,
stepped out of
our door,
took in the
damage,
we looked at
each other, and we knew
that the havoc
wreaked
was not confined
to outdoors.
The gloves
Elske asked me
to go with her. To Jersey,
the Channel
haven for dirty money.
I liked the
idea.
We stayed with
aristocrats she knows,
on their estate.
A little run down but still imposing.
The lady of the
manor told how Charles I
took refuge
there trying not to lose his head.
The king and his
entourage almost lost
them the estate
drinking, eating, and gambling.
After depositing
her constant companion,
the wine bottle,
safely on the mantel—
an operation not
without its difficulty—
Lady Whatsits
opened a small mahogany box
and pushed it
into my hands. Want to try these?
Charles left
them here.
The gloves fit
perfectly.
The
silver-studded gauntlet falling
over my hands, I
felt the descending weight
of almost 400
years. The royal peacock
paraded near the
garden wall, its toes turned
inwards, made a
fan and shrugged.
You rang, Sir?
Boris Karloff.
Face hewn from hard wood, twinkle hidden
behind sunken
eyes. Monsters live in me, hunch
behind every
pillar, waiting in every dark corner.
I hope that love
does, too, like Beauty and the Beast.
We drive through
the part of eastern Europe where
woods belong to
elves and the little people. Where evil queens
find apples to
poison beautiful princesses, where
Jorinde is
enslaved by the wicked witch, where
Hänsel und
Gretel wander still.
Wolves and
bears. Of course. The car eats black asphalt. In the
headlights grey
motes, on the windscreen splat insects.
No yellow lines.
No streetlights. No one else out in this dark night.
Only rain. Only
blackness as the kilometers rush underneath.
I hear the
trees’ warning, feel them closing in.
Orange lights.
Military men.
The border post.
I remember
another border.
another night.
Safety catches
clicking in
quick succession.
The bleak
monster is a little man
in a great coat,
collar up.
He wields
a red stamp.
"Next…"
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels, short stories, eight poetry collections and one chapbook, her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She is a several times ‘Pushcart’ and a ‘Best of Net’ nominee. All her recent books are available on Amazon. The new chapbook, ‘The Matter of Words’, was published in June 2025, and a new full-length collection has been slated for publishing in 2027. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/
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