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Julieanne Larick

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the poet

Julieanne Larick is a poet and editor from Northeast Ohio. She edits poetry for Gasher Press, prose for jmww Journal, and manages social media for The Dodge. Julieanne's poems have appeared in Passengers Journal, Eunoia Review, and Kissing Dynamite. She's currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript, centred on her family mythos and the environment.

the poems

Oranges

00:00 / 01:01
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            Our family comes from pilgrims,

            my mother tells me at dinner.


            They were pilgrims weeping into the river,

            in flight they wept in memory


            frothing with rain and drinking up

            the oranges baka received for Christmas,

            squelching with sour juice and sun.


            My mom asks if baka would want

            to read this about her family.


            Baka grew up too quickly; she watched as pilgrims

            left iron shoes in the swirling disturbances of the Danube,

            her father, the wine-dipping man,

            sinking like the orange in water, an O on his lips. 


            Yes, she would want to read about those years on the Danube,

            those rainfalls and sun showers,


            the stinging grief on our eyelids,

            net of slain fruit in our palms.

Previously published as Pomorandža

A Common Phrase
I Hate

00:00 / 01:13
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            If a tree falls in the forest, it didn’t really happen

            if our bodies aren’t crushed by the force.

            If the deer dies silently by the lake,

            if no one lingers behind while I tie my shoe,

            if no one finds our bodies together, sewn up

            by the earth’s moss, green fingers drawing us further

            away from the people who knew us.

            Did we ever live or die, did we ever love?


            If I scorch my fingertips and no one notices the burn,

            it didn’t really happen since the world keeps spinning

            outside the scars of my hands. Around and around and around 

            until all the people I know wrinkle from a million little pleasures.

            I told a stranger I loved her outfit in a Tesco while I was

            buying six cans of gin fizzes. She wore

            a pink button down and said it was her boyfriend’s. She smiled;

            the first time a stranger smiled at me since I turned 19.

            If we both loved each other but never said a word,

            did it really happen?

Previously published as Elegy to Lying

Home

00:00 / 01:20
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            I take I-71 home from college, unpack

            all the stuff I collected over the year.

            Return my favorite sweater to Nebraska

            and migrate the bird necklace

            to the last man who loved me.


            I leave parties at 7 and spit out drinks, return cigarettes.

            I unwrite lots of essays about Donne and Wordsworth,

            uncheck books from the growing reading list.

            My dad takes back his apologies.

            I absorb salt in my eyes, rub dirt on my skin, abandon

            old friends before loving them again. Unlearn their names.


            I turn 18, then 17, then 16, then 15,

            I ruin a birthday party for my sister then

            go back to the hospital

            where they drain my body of fluids

            and I watch my heart beat faster and slower and I spit 

            the water and all the pills back 

            to where they came from.


            I erase the note saying why I wanted to die,

            that I sense my hometown turn its back on me.

            Leaves cough up orange and blacken in bloom,

            back to their own loving mothers.

Previously published as Warm Creature

Publishing credits

Oranges: Perhappened Magazine (Issue No. 9)

A Common Phrase I Hate: Passengers Magazine

  (Vol 4, Issue No. 2) 

Home: Passengers Magazine (Vol. 4, Issue No. 2)

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