Sample Poems by Mia Bachman

---

angel statues

i remember prying at their resin heads,
assuming that they would just pop loose

like the heads of barbies, and how their
flat hair rested tight against their bodies,

how the robes, the limbs, hair and face
felt no different from any other part,

and the way they seemed to care for me
with open arms at a reasonable distance.

i thought they were idols to worship,
that the spirits of my parents traveled

between the statues placed all around
the house, so they could watch me grow

from anywhere, so they could keep me
safe—that my parents were bound by

god to watch over us, because nonnie
said that love was bound to the heart,

that the hearts of those who are gone
float up to heaven and come back down

whenever we are looking for the people
we love to save us. i wanted to throw

them to the floor one by one, to search
the rubble for the heart that contained

my parent’s faces, cheek-to-cheek, like
a black and white picture in a locket.

instead, i picked each up and shook it,
like guessing what’s inside a present.

---

judgment day

tear down the towers of your souls!
some curly-gray haired fancy suit
says, raising his gavel like an eagle
soaring, glowing like an angel in
a renaissance painting. my mom
and dad sit in separate pews—
he knows by now that he isn’t
my biological father. he doesn’t
want me. he wants my mom to
suffer, wants to keep me as his
right, his privilege. she wants
nothing to do with me, willingly
takes money from her parents
so they can keep me. my body
was purchased: it had a number
for the purpose of trading, defined
the worth of the rest of my life.
nonnie became my mother—rick
became another absent father,
and a chasm opened in the earth:
hell’s stereotypical demons poured
forth, imps, serpents, seraphim,
animatronic and friendly, like
the dummies at chuck-e-cheese,
singing about the end, as if life
was some didactic lesson failed
by all of us, and we were required
by divine law to await our fates.

we all moved on with our lives
with the ease passengers have
exiting a train—knowing our
destinations aren’t too far away,
relying on signs to point us in
the right direction—and though
hell’s chasm never fully closed,
and the demons hovered around
us in every motion that we made,
each of us made the best of love,
treated our lullabies as a sign
to welcome loss and heartache.

---

brown carpet

the carpet may as well be sand
grinding its way into our noses,
a wild-fired bulbous burst of bile,
yellow, grimy, sick to the touch.

we protect us from the dark:
carpet grading at the stomach,
hairy hand clenching the ankle,
red burns melting away our skin.

and when we didn’t listen, pain
like static noises clipping into
each other, making flesh ripple
and tear like an eager disease,

then calling out for god, just as
those who cared had taught us;
then imagining he watched from
inside the walls, a silent witness.

---

the body in pieces

the woods we’re in
are lovely, dark, and
i promise dad that i
won’t let out a peep.

his driver guards
the open trunk,
makes me promise
not to look inside
when he goes pee:

i see an arm wrapped
tight in clear plastic,
and a leg, no—blood?

part of my body remains
standing on that road,
scanning the dark for
my dad’s return, as if
he stayed hidden with
what he had hidden,
buried somewhere deep
with and without me,

and another part is here,
writing a poem about
the body without a torso
or a head, and how it was
buried somewhere deep,
with and without me.