{ bee + spool }

Nicole Bohn is a San Francisco writer. She’s also a fellow 2007 Intergenerational Writers Lab writer. She and others, including Linda Watanabe McFerrin and Mahru Elahi, will be reading their lit work this Wednesday, March 28, 2007, from 7 to 9 at Kearny Street Workshop (180 Capp St. #5 x 17th St., San Francisco).

As a writing exercise, I swapped bits of our life stories with her this weekend. Here is a poem about her that I came up with:

Nicole, Revealing

When you tell my story, say that I
came out here to consider God.
When you put a name to me, say that I’ve
already placed the blooms of my being
by way of ink on skin, in the temperate zone
just above coursing veins, and
other routes to my heart;
that the groove in me done by a dozen surgeries
is where I sow tulips in my spring,
wending up from my thigh
to other blissful parts of me.
I’ve tended to this garden five years now.
We’re not in northern Wisconsin anymore.

Here, I bridge boredom and my body.
Crossing it, I come to scoop out
what I can do
from what I want.
Go ahead and tell my tattoo. Write me.
It tells you what to say when you tell my story.