PoetryMagazine.com
Laure Anne Bosselaar

USA

Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author and of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, and of Small Gods of Grief which was awarded the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry for 2001. Her third poetry collection, A New Hunger, was selected as an ALA Notable Book in 2008. Her poems have appeared iN The Washington Post, Georgia Review,  Ploughshares, AGNI, Harvard Review, and many others. She is editor of four anthologies: Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants and Bars,  Outsiders: Poems about Rebels, Exiles and Renegades,Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the Cities, and Never Before: Poems About First Experiences.  She taught at Emerson College, at the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence College, and at many conferences such as The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA,  the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and the Frost Place Poetry Festival. Fluent in four languages, she is currently translating American poetry into French and Flemish poetry into English.  She and her husband, poet Kurt Brown, completed a book of translations from Flemish poet Herman de Coninck: The Plural of Happiness. She currently teaches at the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College and is a lecturer at the College for Creative Studies at U.C. Santa Barbara, CA http://www.laureannebosselaar.



MEMORY MALL



         Funneled into, tunnelled 
toward the past’s underground:

lives, loves — millennia of them. 

          Cemeteries, mass graves, urns.
Photo albums, memorials, memoirs: 

all clogged with indispensable souls. 

If that’s too abstract, think 
your first love, your neighbor’s dog, 

the stone carver’s son, Rainer Maria Rilke —  

all equally fated, standing in line for, 
or already crowding, memory’s mall.  

I long for that promiscuity: dead gods, 

             scholars, cops and whores equally 
longing for remembrance, selling

their tricks to nothing but bones and dust. 

             I’ve prayed for death, ardently.
And ardently pray 

to be forgiven each plea, fearing the black 

             draft might pull the ones I love 
into that vortex too — 

a siren song we try to sing louder than — 

            but our tune nothing more
than cinders turning to stone: a rock 

no memory, love or god can ever roll back. 

 

 

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