Our courtship lacked flourishes. 
No trendy restaurant invitations, 
no mind-blowing bouquets, 
no diamond offered on one knee, 
no serenades under the bedroom window, 
in short, one hardly noticed. 

Instead, there were the calls 
you made for me in Spanish, 
a shell you found on the beach 
holding it out for me to take, 
a smile you painted on a flat, smooth 
stone that fit right into my hand, 
sharing my music on long rides 
through the Castilian hills, 
the heavy cooler on your shoulders 
when we descended the stone steps 
leading to the green River Duratón 
for a picnic and a swim, 
a chair we shared in the packed 
old bar, a cup of the most famous 
consommé in all Madrid, 
taking me to taste the grilled 
mushrooms in a hole in the wall 
of the Plaza Mayor. 

When you finally moved in 
you had a fever from anxiety; 
when your books merged with mine 
I knew that you would stay. 

Rose Mary Boehm

is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and the author of two novels, short stories, eight poetry collections, and one poetry chapbook. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print), and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

All of Boehm’s poetry books are available at Amazon, including her chapbook The Matter of Words: (almost) found poems (Kelsay Books, June 2025), as well as Whistling in the Dark (Cyberwit, 2022) and these collections also published by Kelsay Books: Life Stuff (2023), Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders? (2022), Saudade (2022), and From the Ruhr to Somewhere Near Dresden 1939 to 1949: A Child’s Journey (Kelsay Books: Aldrich Press, 2016).

Author’s website: https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Index of Contributors, with links to a dozen of Rose Mary Boehm’s poems (plus a book review) that appear here in MacQueen’s Quinterly

⚡ Sirens to Larks: Interview with Poet Rose Mary Boehm (9 June 2025) by Luanne Castle in her blog, Poetry and Other Words (and cats!). Interview begins with the profound impact of Boehm’s childhood on her poetry: “From the Ruhr to Somewhere Near Dresden 1939 to 1949: A Child’s Journey, is a witness to those years, but years that were intensely defined by being a German child living in Germany during WWII.”

⚡ A Conversation with Poet Rose Mary Boehm by Kathleen Cassen Mickelson in One Minnesota Crone (1 March 2024), with sample poems from Life Stuff.

An excerpt: “...I have been known to write some short, quite surreal poems, inventing a little guy called Mungo. There are 25 of them, and they have been published in The New Absurdist. Responsible for these is fabulous German poet Christian Morgenstern, whom I still admire and love to this day. His poems were often gently funny, poking the sleeping bears (the politicians) and/or incredibly playful. And if Morgenstern could write ‘Fish’s Night Song’ [1905], then anything was possible.”

(See also the brief interpretation of Morgenstern’s visual poem in Futility Closet [23 July 2012].)