BIO
The author of ten books of poetry and short fiction, Laurel Ann Bogen is a founding member of the celebrated poetry performance ensemble, Nearly Fatal Women. Since 1990 she has been an instructor in the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension where she received the Outstanding Instructor of the Year of the Award in 2008. In 2016 Red Hen Press will publish All of the Above: New and Selected Poems.
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Statuary / Poem for My Girlhood
Four white gazebos corner
a rose garden
out of season
shorn and prickly like a nun
a girl in a white cotton blouse
orange and white polka-dot skirt
winter in California
bare legs and notebook
dry as skin she writes
hollow virginal couplets
In the center stands Apollo
his bronze torso firm and cold
and she knows somewhere
she must reach out
embrace marble to bronze
she buries her face in his plexus
her pale arms encircle
his sturdy legs
and in the coldness of her face
it all comes rushing
the heat of lost art
all in her arms
Homestead
Her hands clip the air
he calibrates the weeds
they had planned a victory garden
a monument to their undying
love one
two
three
steps to the porch
a dog in a cage
tears at metal
too fierce for propriety
do you want to know
what they dream about?
the moon-pulled waves of Easter Island
a pan of milk lapping at their toes
they pull up weed and root
babies fatten like tubers underground
dropped into haphazard baskets
with their trowels, snails and fruit
they inch slowly forward
soon
soon they think
looking to the clouds
soon we will be
so very happy
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