Adrift in an azure trance, affixed by invisible
star-points of pins to the sumptuous nothing of black
velvet, it’s as immense as the word once
uttered once, buffeted by silence, to float or sink.
Gazing into the pool-like body, how slowly it becomes
the coffined loved one—exotic, exhausted, ex-
everything. Small as Earth on television, then realer:
the otherworldly waters of Iceland flown over
once, the shifting blues frightening in their nearness,
the glorious black shore. You, afraid until the sensation
of a longed-for presence hit, better than morphine.
You clapped with the rest—reborn, exhilarated.
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A Violence: Poems by Paula Bohince is available from Princeton University Press.
Paula Bohince
Paula Bohince is the author of four poetry collections, most recently A Violence (Princeton, 2025). Her poems have appeared in The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.
