Honorable Mention Poetry: On Bornholm

I look for stipples of myself
in white-washed, rough-walled rundkirker,
where infant ancestors were baptized
in stone fonts next to Viking steles.
I listen for echoes of my pulse
between the pooled velvet of wheat fields
and the Baltic kissing the feet of island pines.

Velkommen til Bornholm.

Cornflowers twine the sign for Arnager
—no edges in this name
which melts off my father’s tongue—
where we eat smoked fish at the røgeri.
A single paved road slopes past houses
stacked against the silver tablecloth of ocean.
A tow-headed child splashes in hose-water.

Here, I try to find behind centuries
a fine-chinned girl carding wool,
trimming suits for her father, a skrædder.
I look for the last day she walks the six miles
to the busy cobblestones of Rønne harbor
to marry the missionary whose clothes
her mother washed for three years,
and to honeymoon on steamship, traincar, haystack:

Welcome to Utah.

We bike the same six Bornholm miles
through barley and beeches
to the sun-colored houses
of Rønne—this name
a twirl in the throat—

and I glean belonging from fields
that once held some mirror-fleck of myself.