Paula Bohince’s “The Green”
The LARB Quarterly no. 45, “Submission,” presents a new poem by Paula Bohince.
By Paula BohinceJuly 8, 2025
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This poem is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 45: Submission. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.
¤
The Green
There is green, there is the green
of childhood, the green missing, the one,
the one green given to the priest’s eyes
in the airplane aisle, Oh God,
there is green, the single
green pane smearing the backward
glare and breakneck present
of green going, green thrall of time
and lark landed, playing
greenly one tongue
undone to music, pendulum
of green that was, that was, I don’t imagine
I’ll return, surround of walnut hulls,
a tabled dollar, I’ve held on to
childishness longer than most, green loss,
the green, Oh God, it is the cause.
¤
Featured image: Vincent van Gogh. The Poet’s Garden, 1888. The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection (1933.433). CC0, artic.edu. Accessed July 1, 2025. Image has been cropped.
LARB Contributor
Paula Bohince’s fourth poetry collection, A Violence, will be published in fall 2025 as part of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The New York Review of Books, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere.
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