Bobbi Lurie across two issues
Bobbi Lurie is a poet, essayist, and visual artist. Her books include The Book I Never Read, Letter from the Lawn, Grief Suite, the morphine poems, and it’s only a dream. — be enchanted. Her work joins lyric fragmentation with visual attention, memory, grief, intimacy, and the instability of everyday scenes.
Issue 19 preserves “Linoleum,” a poem built from imagined domestic observation: a kitchen, tomatoes, garlic, coffee, cake, cigarettes, gestures, and the speaker’s painful distance from the scene. Issue 39 preserves “I married an open field and treated it widely,” where marriage, horses, wind, direction, disguise, and the past move through nine compressed lines.
Linoleum
He is standing in his kitchen laughing with his wife
about me. She is cutting tomatoes on the wood counter
where he made me coffee, sliced a piece of chocolate
cake onto the plate. His wife is crushing garlic
cloves for the eggplant, he is laughing with her saying
I am whatever he is saying. His polyester shirt clings tight
to his body, untouched by his wife. She is smoking Marlboros
next to the stove, dumping cloves of garlic into the hot
oil. He is laughing, brushing the hair from her face
with his hand as she moves the wooden spoon in the pan,
as she laughs when he says something I can’t hear
but I see it as if I were there.
I married an open field and treated it widely
This open field was wild with horses who couldn’t
All the running and rarely in my direction
I disguised myself as the wind
Became directionless
Disgruntled and running
We had married in one direction
It was all a disguise
No animal outruns its past
Things did not last between us
Books and visual work
Bobbi Lurie’s author site gathers her poems, essays, visual art, and books. The Writer’s Almanac documents her life as both poet and visual artist. In 2025, A24 published her fifth poetry collection, it’s only a dream. — be enchanted.