Boyer Rickel


Memorial for Medical School Cadavers


Who were they before?
A parent, a child, a co-worker, a friend?
What books did they read?
Did they live alone?
When did they rise? When fall asleep?
Did they regret having children?
Or having missed the chance?
What music moved them most?
What TV shows, what films?
Did they have close friends?
Were their parents proud, or think them odd?
Was he a husband? Was she a wife?
Did they believe in God?  
Was this their afterlife?

 

                    (Science Times, June 4, 2023)

Drift


So predators
can’t catch them
off guard, dolphins and
fur seals sleep
with one eye
open, half
their brains
at rest.

Whereas
the elephant seal
in under-
water slumber slowly
spirals.
A five-ton leaf
in descent.

Its brain
in REM,
sleek
as a teardrop
pendant it
flips,

circling for
a thousand feet upside
down, oblivious
to its fall.

Whereas
I at 4 a.m.
toss side
to side, half
lodged in dream—

my mother
insisting
the ants on the kitchen counter
be named for planets—half

climbing
phantom stairs
in a counting game

in a somewhere
between

somewhere
and between.

 

                    (Science Times, April 25, 2023)

Also by Boyer Rickel: Interview, "Gray Ghost," "He Crushes Me," "A Haunting," "Present, Absent"
In the store: Tempo Rubato

 

photo: John Levy

Boyer Rickel is the author most recently of Morgan (a Lyric), winner of the 2020 Gold Line Press nonfiction chapbook contest, selected by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. In addition to two book-length poetry collections, remanence (Parlor Press) and arreboles (Wesleyan), and a memoir-in-essays, Taboo (Wisconsin), he has published three poetry chapbooks, Tempo Rubato (Green Linden Press), Musick’s Hand-maid and reliquary (both from Seven Kitchens Press). His honors include poetry fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The Arizona Commission on the Arts, as well as awards for lyric essays from Prairie Schooner and Tupelo Quarterly. He taught in the University of Arizona Creative Writing Program for twenty years, serving as assistant director from 1991 to 2004.

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