Ephemera: Poems

by Evana Bodiker

Overview

In Ephemera, winged creatures elegize and celebrate the beauty of evanescence simultaneously. The poems speak to the ambivalence of coming of age beset by the daily trials of chronic illness as viewed through the lens of femininity and love in the confessional tradition.

Odysseus
 
Difficult to divine how you arrived,
not water-doused or mail-slotted to me,
but whole in your stone-centered gaze, almost
tired out by your ninety days under stars.
Satisfied by none, you chose me to be
your canary, waiting, green with hope for
 
your return. Coming home from the back-woods,
you made me into your mooring, fashioned
yourself into a pilgrim to my bed’s
unmade shrine. I’ll make a Ulysses out
of you yet. Yes, the butterfly kind, blue
body mild as the Aegean, crushing.
 
I will weave our dreams together: never
go back to sea without me as your mate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781680031492
Publisher:	Texas Review Press
Publication date:	06/21/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	48
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

EVANA BODIKER studied English literature and poetry writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her poems have been awarded the Anthony Abbott Prize and recognized in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.

Read an Excerpt

Fever Ghazal

My skin’s temperature announces 103. A fever:
a spiking, sinking, cold sweating fever.
I wish I had a damp washcloth for my forehead.
I beg for respite, but it loves me, this fever.
Once in childlike haze, crying out for Mother,
Grandmother’s ghost appeared to me in fever.
Aching, from desert to tundra, there’s no other
choice than to stay anchored to this fever.
Red-striped, strep throat, summer aches;
away from home at camp, scarlet in my fever.
Like a melting ice cube, the moon’s touch snakes
down my skin; even she can’t stop my fever.
Decades of fighting febrility in my bed;
haven’t I earned forgiveness from such fever?
Finally, a cool hand touches my forehead.
She blesses, “Little warrior, you’ll break this fever.”

Table of Contents

• I
  • Fever Ghazal
  • Ephemera
  • Mold
  • Swimming Lesson
  • Fearfully Made
  • Nebulizer
  • Gas Station Entomology
• II
  • Mise En Place
  • Ode to Undercooked Chicken
  • Fibrosis
  • Wasp Nest
  • Pas de deux
  • Hess Road Oak
  • Morning Feeding
• III
  • Maintenant
  • Leah, Late March
  • Blue Morpho
  • Aubade
  • Odysseus
  • Ode for Hayes
  • Pollen Season
• Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

Ephemera is a book about fearless fragility. Born with cystic fibrosis, Evana Bodiker has had to fight to stay alive. ‘Little warrior, you’ll break this fever,’ her grandmother’s ghost tells her, and thus initiates the reader’s journey into this book breath by breath. The breathing is poetry. Ephemera delivers a great delight in sound. . . . We are carried graciously on the wings of the poet’s scarred lungs. In ‘Fibrosis,’ Bodiker is speaking with Sylvia Plath, an obvious influence, who addresses Bodiker as a ‘blood shod woman,’ and tells her, ‘Little Sister, your invisible disfigurement emancipates me.’ The poet leaves the reader playfully in pollen dust during allergy season saying, ‘I want a veil of yellow, / for someone to realize before the pollen / covers the world again, that I was here.’”
—Loueva Smith
author of Consequences of a Moonless Night

“Evana Bodiker is a wonderfully alert poet, paying inventive attention to the world around and within her. These twenty-two appreciations of the ephemeral are very durably made, brimming with berbal delights: ‘My method is / savoring,’ as she says. Though her poems deal with challenging subjects—our all-too-mortal bodies, our families and loved ones, the incidental perils of our lives—they make their way to hard-won joy. Ephemera is a fine debut.”
—Michael McFee
author of The Smallest Talk
 

“Throughout Ephemera, Evana Bodiker delves into questions of hunger and desire in many forms. The tenderness in this collection is never without edge, the passion never without risk. Finely crafted and full of entrancing intimacy, these poems are both haunting and nourishing, like stepping into the ‘newly elongated evening light.’”
—Chloe Honum
author of The Tulip-Flame
 

From the Publisher