Order the Summer 2026 issue of Nimrod International Journal or subscribe today.
Today we bring you two poems from our Summer 2026 issue that touch, in different tones but with related images, on the wonders and sacrifices of birth and motherhood. Both Zina Gomez-Liss, recounting a difficult labor, and Paula Bohince, contemplating the moon, connect the experience of the human body to the broader forces—biological and geological—that give rise to and condition life itself. As Gomez-Liss’s speaker looks foggily at the monitors in the delivery room, she sees “a moving landscape: green-lined peaks and vales / that pulsed and beat inside.” And as Bohince’s speaker stands “under a maternal light,” she wonders, “Didn’t cave drawings depict this // The life vein the igneous breast”? While the first speaker recalls “magnesium sulfate cours[ing] / through my blue veins like liquid fire” to prevent seizures, the second speaker thinks of how the “[d]isfigured moon in snow-lit water,” a figure for all mothers, “gave up her teeth for my bones.”
So This Is Love So this is love. It’s not the racing heart, the scent of springtime cherry blossoms strewn beneath our feet along the avenue. It’s not the picnics in the park, the late night dates at diners, talking until dawn. It’s not the kiss, the fluster of our hands on clothes, on skin. It’s not the passion of our fights and making up. It’s not the quiet Sunday mornings with our coffee cups. Remember when magnesium sulfate coursed through my blue veins like liquid fire? I faded out to some strange song. A concert of concern sang in the dim lit room. The baby cried. Electric heartsong strummed through cords connected to machines. Black screens displayed a moving landscape: green-lined peaks and vales that pulsed and beat inside. I heard you hum as you rocked in your arms our newborn son. I strained for one last look of you and him and falling into dreams from which I did not know I’d wake—I knew that I had loved. — Zina Gomez-Liss Clair de Lune The moon releases her snow A sad excitement enters the river I stood in the courtyard and watched her (Bare breasts in the apartment) I was under a maternal light Light shone on the breasts that fed me The moon releases her shame Her face the first moon her body I drank her as she weakened We were naked together too often And if it made her happy Didn’t cave drawings depict this The life vein the igneous breast Standing in snow I am wistful for snow Diary writ in a minor key Disfigured moon in snow-lit water She gave up her teeth for my bones Shunned the moon disappears Tragic the black impregnable distance Wherever she moonless lives — Paula Bohince
Paula Bohince is the author of four poetry collections, most recently A Violence (Princeton, 2025). Her poems have appeared in London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. She has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, two Fellowships from the NEA, and a Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets.
Zina Gomez-Liss is the deputy editor of New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry and a graduate student in the MFA program at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. She lives in Boston with her husband and five children.
Order the Summer 2026 issue of Nimrod International Journal or subscribe today.
"Tragic the black impenetrable distance / wherever she moonless lives" has a very satisfying resonance with one of Eliot's Four Quartos ("Burnt Norton" I think?). Two beautiful poems.
Thank you so much for the honor of being in this issue and for pairing me today with Paula’s beautiful poem. I’ve reread it several times and it grows more luminous with every visit.