Welcome readers!
We’re happy to introduce Freya Rohn, our selection for November’s Poetry at Ephemera. Thanks to Freya and everyone who submitted! If you’d like to participate, we will be fielding submissions each month to publish one poem per issue from the same poet for the month. Each poet receives a $200 honorarium. For full rules and more info please see our designated post about Poetry at Ephemera. You can also submit via the button:
Introducing, Freya Rohn!
Writer Bio
Freya Rohn is a writer, editor, and curator. Her work has appeared in several publications, including Colorado Review, Sugarhouse Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, and Bellingham Review, where her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska, the homeland of the Dena’ina, and writes at The Ariadne Archive (freyarohn.substack.com).
Artist Statement
Marguerite Porete, a 13th-century mystic described her experience of the divine as the FarNear. Poet Anne Carson wrote about Porete’s use of the term: “I have no idea what it means but it gives me a thrill.” I too feel that thrill when I hear it. While it seems to pair opposite or contradictory ideas, the word has a sense and meaning in it that makes me want to spend time with it—to explode the two words and pull them back together, to see what lands.
The FarNear is how I’ve come to think of poetry. It can be a lyricism that draws a surprise turn, or the smashing of words that suddenly etches out a feeling of deep clarity. It is the contradictory as it dissolves what is hidden, bringing new discovery. My interest in words is to explore a way to sit with the contradictions in our lives—of present and past, the longing for both solitude and connection, of privacy and exposure. For the impossible to be true and the truth to be impossible. This is why I write—to seek the power of words in collision and distance, moving beyond irony to become something more precise. To measure the distance between, and find what that remains.
Poems
Each issue of Ephemera spanning November will feature one poem from Freya Rohn. After each issue drops, the poem from that issue will then appear here as well. This post will remain on our Substack, free to view, for the year.
Poem 1 of 4
After a death
“...they cut silhouettes and burned them to call back our frightened spirits.” — Tu Fu
Cold again
I pour hot water
measure tea for the cup.I leave the lights off
to test how strong
the daylight—
how much more
even rain-grey
we can work by.In the corner window
a robin lands
stands on the railing—
a silhouette cut
among vines
of still-growing nasturtiumthe red chest unseen
as if to not take away
the bright honey, red fork
of the last frost-lipped bloominstead, he burns there
under ash wing and flies—
a streak of heart caught fire
once the feet find airbefore I turn back
still waiting for
the tea to darken
in my cup.(previously published: Bellingham Review, Issue 69, Fall 2015)
If you’ve made it this far, please consider becoming a paid subscriber at the monthly or yearly level. We offer perks to our subscribers and are looking to add more as time goes on. We’re recently reached an important milestone, 100 subscribers, which is fantastic and a testament to the generosity of the creative community, and yet in order to reach sustainability, in essence, for us to carry on, we need to reach the 200 subscriber threshold and beyond. Dare we dream that this little weekly can be sustaining? We’ll still have to keep our jobs and side gigs and hustles, but maybe if we hit 200 we’ll be able to work a little less on those and more on Ephemera and on literature and creativity. If you haven’t yet had the opportunity to consider becoming a paid member, we humbly ask you to consider the $5/month to start and if you like us and the offerings, at some point think about the yearly. Many thanks and much love.
Poem 2 of 4
The curve of the earth
My son asks what are the heavens—
his brush hovering over watercolors
with the deliberation of a bee’s errand—watching horizon floods of green
take shape across white paper—
like the curve of the earth.There are many things I thought would be
difficult to explain, but heavens wasn’t
on my list. In my pause he tells me
it rhymes with seven—and perhaps this is how
everything begins—an object
paired with another, rhyme
begging for rhyme, hungry
for its own lines of definition—And starting from seven,
I said: the moon and sun
an alphabet of planets
and stars—everything
beyond the horizon
where the earth bends—not knowing if gods come into this
or if my child’s question
is enough of an answer
(previously published: Cirque, Vol. 3, Issue 1, Winter 2011)
Poem 3 of 4
Fall
My window broke yellow this morning—
leaves wheeling with each shake
of light—birch trees
hooked with sullen
coins, matched reefs
of candle flames
as sudden as sun breakingbreaking through summer
exposing some mescaline
otherworld—and wakingwith these leaves—
now warblers in the inevitable
wind, the world becoming
one cadmium sun in an
escape of window blindblinded, I thought:
how kind death is to leaves—
mothering the fading abundant green
to reveal the burnished yellow
undercarriage, wired
and hollow as bird bonesfalling on the wind’s
shoulders to end
on the earth’s instep
quiet as breath
made visible
in the first cold—disappearing color
into a bleed
of snow.
(previously published: Sugar House Review, Issue 11, Summer 2015)
Poem 4 of 4
Ars botanica
Appearing in Ephemera Nov. Iss 4