Mary Buchinger
Mary Buchinger’s poems have appeared in Caesura, Cortland Review, Euphony, Existere, Ibbetson Street,
New Madrid, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Upstairs at Duroc (France), RUNES: A
Literary Review, Slice, The Massachusetts Review, Versal (The Netherlands), and other journals; she
was invited to read her work at the Library of Congress in the Poetry
at Noon Series, and was the
recipient of the New England Poetry Club’s Daniel Varoujan Award, judged by Marge Piercy. Her
collection, Roomful of Sparrows (2008), was a semi-finalist in the New Women’s Voices Series.
Mary is currently working on a manuscript about her
experiences as a Peace Corps Volunteer
in Ecuador.
She holds a Ph.D. in applied linguistics and is associate
professor of English and
communication studies at the
Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
in Boston.
White Space, Interrupted
Black vine charcoal trees stretch into the snow
of the page. This, a new page the artist borrowed
just for the day to carry what it can. Bear in mind,
none of this was here before; it is wrong to want more.
The penciled-in pond stands ready to absorb
the blank of the page and all its black vine trees.
Around it in a ring, slips of cattails lean against
one another, remind us beauty is poor sustenance.
In the corner, a white bowl, outlined
by snow, grips stones in a clasp of ice.
The only touch of pastels—what can happen
when we forget what we had planned—
these coral and green stones from flat
far-away shores, their accidental color
a language with little sense here, but assume
it has rules, that it too can be learned.
--in Existere: Journal of Arts and Literature, Spring/Summer 2010
