EMILY SHEARER
Emily Shearer is an ex-pat writer exploring the weight of the word “home”. A native of Hendersonville, NC, she received her RYT in Texas after teaching yoga in Prague for years. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and shortlisted for the Judith B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the University of Houston Robertson Prize. Her poetry has been published in Ruminate, West Texas Review, jellybucket, Psaltery&Lyre, stirring, Fiolet&Wing, the bookends review, Crow Hollow Books, The Tishman Review, Twice Upon a Time Fairy Tale Anthology and All We Can Hold: poems about motherhood, among others. She was featured in the inaugural issue of Minerva Rising, an independent literary journal where she served for four years as the Poetry Editor. She now teaches yoga, French, English and creative writing at fusion academy, volunteers extensively as a yoga healer and advocate at the Montgomery County Emergency Women's Center, and facilitates Trauma Sensitive Yoga, yoga nidra and Yoga for Creative Writers workshops both on-line and at yoga studios in the Woodlands area.
About
I AM HOPE-GIRL
​
May 1, 2020
All that I have met has become
a part of me: the angels and the dark artistes and down-at-heel’s,
the floods and dogs and kaleidoscopic ferris wheels,
mystic bistro oyster-shucking gentlemen
of the quarter, the quarter-masters, the ring masters—
I am a sweet disaster, one of all beings, the hurdy-gurdy
hula-hoopers, the do-gooders and the back-stabbers,
the cabbies, the bikers through Italian piazza carnevale and Easter azalea parade;
I laid down palm fronds. I burned a witch and rose up from the flame.
I’ve forgotten half my names. Born on Beltane,
day of labor, I took a train to work
on rhymes tomorrow. I’m a reframed Picasso.
Once a broken-footed baby, I’m a dancer, an answer
looking for a question, a crumb
of bread under the table and the bird who pecks it pecks it pecks it
carries it home. I am not alone. I am Hope-
Girl. I had miles to go and zero
minutes to do The Thing and I’m the one who made it
possible to believe
we had wings. I am yelling, switching codes
ALL ABOARD! All roads lead ‘round the sun. Je suis birthday. Je suis begun.
Ja jsem tady jsem tady jsem. I am here I am here I am Em.
photo credit Katrine Rosenberget,
Paris, France
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Wondering about the name of this website? Bohemia is the name of a region in the Czech Republic. Gypsies, Roma and traveling artists and other creative types wandered through the land on their way to stops further west. When asked where they had come from, they would mention Bohemia, which then came to be known as a region rich in culture, art, flowing fashions and free-spiritedness.
Bohemia + Emily = Bohemily
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In the last line of that poem up there, I go by the nickname Em. When I was born, my older brother couldn't pronounce Emily so he called me Baby --- For the first years of my life, I was known to all as "Bee." Shortly after he learned to wrap his tongue around Emily, he shortened that too, and then I came to be called, to those closest to me, "Em."
