Late Afternoon Stroll on the Cliffs by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

As usual, Death sweetly slips her arm in mine— & we take a deep breath from the eucalyptus breeze. We both worked honestly at our jobs: all day Death destroyed traffic with wailing ambulances while I killed hours & lines on eight-&-a-half by eleven inch pages. We’re fast friends by now, Death much older of course, but there’s no hierarchy between us: we’re both taking a break from it all, glad to watch waves collapse on rocks & pelicans dive-bomb fish. I try to be sensitive to Death’s guilt: that whole pandemic disaster she can no longer control. She’ll soon betray me too—like she will you.  I know. But today the gulls are silver angels etching great cursive blessings in a perfect sky—so Death & I make believe we believe that, & amble on.

Recommend me a poem

I have another one. I read this in my Creative Writing class forever ago, and it's stuck with me since.

Stillbirth Laure-Anne Bosselaar

On a platform, I heard someone call out your name: No, Laetitia, no. It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing, but I rushed in, searching for your face.

But no Laetitia. No. No one in that car could have been you, but I rushed in, searching for your face: no longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two.

No one in that car could have been you. Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen. No longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two: I sometimes go months without remembering you.

Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen: I was told not to look. Not to get attached— I sometimes go months without remembering you. Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.

I was told not to look. Not to get attached. It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing. Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space. On a platform, I heard someone calling your name.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Early Morning Considerations After a Night of Rain

There you are, first light freckling the curtains with dawn while the jay insists: It’s six. Six! It’s six — as if I don’t know that. Good morning, welcome, new Thursday. I arc the blankets away. The dog sheds gladness all around me as war news shrapnels out of NPR. Outside, everything is still gleam & green after the first rain in months, & petrichor — a word some poets sequin into their…

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The Pleasures of Hating

by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

I hate Mozart. Hate him with that healthy

pleasure one feels when exasperation has

crescendoed, when lungs, heart, throat,

and voice explode at once: I hate that! —

there’s bliss in this, rapture. My shrink

tried to disabuse me, convinced I use Amadeus

as a prop: Think further; your father perhaps?

I won’t go back, think of the shrink

with a powdered wig, pinched lips, mole:

a transference, he’d say, a relapse: so be it.

I hate broccoli, chain saws, patchouli, bra-

clasps that draw dents in your back, roadblocks,

men in black kneesocks, sandals and shorts —

I love hating that. Loathe stickers on tomatoes,

jerky, deconstruction, nazis, doilies. I delight

in detesting. And love loving so much after that.

FLP POETRY BOOK OF THE DAY: LETTING GRAVITY SPEAK by Erika Michael

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Erika Michael, a Seattle resident since 1966, received her Ph.D. in Art History from The University of Washington. She has participated in extended poetry workshops with Carolyn Forché, Thomas Lux, Linda Gregerson, Laure-Anne Bosselaar,Tim Siebles, Major Jackson, and Jeffrey Levine. Her work has appeared in Poetica Magazine, Cascade, Drash, Bracken Magazine, The Winter Anthology, Belletrist Magazine, The Dewdrop, Aletheia Literary Quarterly (Third Prize Finalist) and elsewhere. In 2019 she won first prize in the Ekphrastic Poetry Contest at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.

PRAISE FOR LETTING GRAVITY SPEAK by Erika Michael

In Letting Gravity Speak, Erika Michael has strung fine lines to catch the gravitons of love. This stunning arrangement of poems captures and holds all the charges and contours of a great, long, complicated conjugal adventure—its vaults and plummets, its sensuous and heady immersions in wonders both outer and intimate, and, most significantly, that love’s antigravity persistence, even its intensification, through loss. Michael’s poems are elegant, bold, and sing in all the idioms of a remarkably full life. Fused here are art history, topology, street talk, Torah, deep ecology, the beloved’s brilliance, the fraying of memory, the erotic and the holy…all in a forcefield of relentless resilience that discovers joy again and again in the mystery and magnificence of the world.

–Jed Myers, author of Watching the Perseids and The Marriage of Space and Time

“Erika Michael’s debut collection is equal parts elegy and celebration, a book that bears witness to the loss of her beloved husband after nearly fifty years of marriage. We see two lives shaped by a curiosity that drove them to explore, from a train ride across the Pyrenees to the ‘coffee-dappled/ Danube,’ a curiosity that sustained Michael as she made a record of her husband’s final journey, from complex mathematical hypotheses to the halls of the memory care unit in which he struggled through his last days. In her grief, the world is described ‘as noiseless as our / kitchen in the morning without the clank / and hiss I crave, more silent than stones / that I’ve piled on your grave,’ yet we also watch her find her way back to wonder. Informed by Jewish prayers and practices, as well as the wisdom of a long life well-lived, these musical and searching poems exude vulnerability and dignity. Letting Gravity Speak exerts a gravity all its own.”

–Jessica Jacobs, author of Take Me With You, Wherever You’re Going, and Pelvis With Distance and Nickole Brown, author of Sister, Fanny Says, and The Donkey Elegies

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I sometimes go months without remembering you. / Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar, from "Stillbirth"

“Late Afternoon Stroll on the Cliffs” - Laure-Anne Bosselaar

As usual, Death sweetly slips her arm in mine— & we take a deep breath from the eucalyptus breeze. We both worked honestly at our jobs: all day Death destroyed traffic with wailing ambulances while I killed hours & lines on eight-&-a-half by eleven inch pages. We’re fast friends by now, Death much older of course, but there’s no hierarchy between us: we’re both taking a break from it all, glad to watch waves collapse on rocks & pelicans dive-bomb fish. I try to be sensitive to Death’s guilt: that whole pandemic disaster she can no longer control. She’ll soon betray me too—like she will you. I know. But today the gulls are silver angels etching great cursive blessings in a perfect sky—so Death & I make believe we believe that, & amble on.

Late Afternoon Stroll on the Cliffs

Laure-Anne Bosselaar

As usual, Death sweetly slips her arm in mine— & we take a deep breath from the eucalyptus breeze. We both worked honestly at our jobs: all day Death destroyed traffic with wailing ambulances while I killed hours & lines on eight-&-a-half by eleven inch pages. We’re fast friends by now, Death much older of course, but there’s no hierarchy between us: we’re both taking a break from it all, glad to watch waves collapse on rocks & pelicans dive-bomb fish. I try to be sensitive to Death’s guilt: that whole pandemic disaster she can no longer control. She’ll soon betray me too—like she will you. I know. But today the gulls are silver angels etching great cursive blessings in a perfect sky—so Death & I make believe we believe that, & amble on.

Late Afternoon Stroll on the Cliffs

Laure-Anne Bosselaar

As usual, Death sweetly slips her arm in mine— & we take a deep breath from the eucalyptus breeze. We both worked honestly at our jobs: all day Death destroyed traffic with wailing ambulances while I killed hours & lines on eight-&-a-half by eleven inch pages. We’re fast friends by now, Death much older of course, but there’s no hierarchy between us: we’re both taking a break from it all, glad to watch waves collapse on rocks & pelicans dive-bomb fish. I try to be sensitive to Death’s guilt: that whole pandemic disaster she can no longer control. She’ll soon betray me too—like she will you. I know. But today the gulls are silver angels etching great cursive blessings in a perfect sky—so Death & I make believe we believe that, & amble on.

Rooms Remembered | Laure-Anne Bosselaar

“Rooms Remembered” Laure-Anne Bosselaar

I needed, for months after he died, to remember our rooms—              some lit by the trivial, others ample

with an obscurity that comforted us: it hid our own darkness.              So for months, duteous, I remembered:

rooms where friends lingered, rooms with our beds,              with our books, rooms with curtains I sewed

from bright cottons. I remembered tables of laughter,              a chipped bowl in early light, black

branches by a window, bowing toward night, & those rooms,              too, in which we came together

to be away from all. And sometimes from ourselves:              I remembered that, also.

But tonight—as I stand in the doorway to his room              & stare at dusk settled there—

what I remember best is how, to throw my arms around his neck,              I needed to stand on the tip of my toes.

Mother Mary Comes to Me: A Pop Culture Poetry Anthology is complete and at the printer with a publication date of Nov. 19, 2020. This international anthology features 63 poets hailing from America, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Spain, and Mexico. Karen Head and I are thrilled to have work from well-known poets like recent Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, Ivy Alvarez, Alice Friman, Jeannine Hall Gailey, and Rick Campbell. And we're equally thrilled to introduce new voices and beautiful work by poets that you've likely never heard before. Pre-order at this link. 

Late Afternoon Stroll on the Cliffs

By Laure-Anne Bosselaar

As usual, Death sweetly slips her arm in mine—

& we take a deep breath from the eucalyptus breeze.

We both worked honestly at our jobs: all day Death

destroyed traffic with wailing ambulances while I killed

hours & lines on eight-&-a-half by eleven inch pages.

We’re fast friends by now, Death much older of course,

but there’s no hierarchy between us: we’re both taking

a break from it all, glad to watch waves collapse on rocks

& pelicans dive-bomb fish. I try to be sensitive to Death’s

guilt: that whole pandemic disaster she can no longer

control. She’ll soon betray me too—like she will you.

I know. But today the gulls are silver angels etching

great cursive blessings in a perfect sky—so Death & I

make believe we believe that, & amble on.

NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: My Antarctica by Janlori Goldman

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Janlori Goldman’s first full-length book Bread from a Stranger’s Oven (2017) was chosen by Laure-Anne Bosselaar for the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published widely, including in The Cortland Review, Split This Rock’s Poem-of-the-Week, Beloit Poetry Journal, and forthcoming in Rhino. She teaches courses in public health and social justice, is a writing mentor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and lives with her sweetheart in Accord, New York.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR My Antarctica by Janlori Goldman

“In this stunning volume, Janlori Goldman undertakes a searching expedition, on which some world histories are visited, and old traumas brought home and repossessed. The center of this journey is a searing “crown of sonnets” that enlarges the literature of that demanding form. Poem by poem, even as we watch, Goldman transmutes the raw nectar of living into the honey of a deeply moving art.”

–Suzanne R. Hoover, PhD, Literary Scholar and Faculty, Sarah Lawrence College Graduate Writing Program

In the poems of My Antarctica, Janlori Goldman is on the move, engaged in exploring the terms of the heroic quest as she ranges over longitudes and latitudes of the imagination, from fraught interior landscapes of childhood to a rediscovered and riskily renovated home place and the far pole of peril and inner discovery. The poet embodies her own exploration, seeking to “chart my own geography,/how the body rises up/and away from itself.” She defines her destination as a journey: “I can split, be my own/fork in the road, lichen/growing over its gash,/or be the border wall/that guides my hand.” These poems lead us to lay claim to our own hearts.

–David Groff, author of Clay

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English homework help

http://www.webdelsol.com/InPosse/bosselaar9.htm

Great Gullet Creek by Laure-Anne Bosselaar is a poem that’s rich in imagery and sensory details. Even if you’ve never been to Bosselaar’s native country of Belgium, she uses such rich descriptive details that she allows readers to experience a small slice of Belgium for themselves.

For this assignment, you should read “Great Gullet Creek” out loud…

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I know this graphic makes it look like I’m making this up and in all honesty I do make up a lot stuff I post on Instagram in my expansive playful idea of “posting” but this is true! I swear!See below there are other people involved - I wouldn’t bring those other people into my madness... would I? I’ll leave that for you to decide. But THIS SATURDAY AT THE SANTA BARBARA PUBLIC LIBRARY! ME! I'll be speaking on the creative panel this coming Saturday morning at 9:45 am there's a networking time before and a publishing panel after. With great local writers and editors - at the very least it will make you feel like writing even if you're not! Kinda like watching those cooking shows. And there's me! Angela Borda(Santa Barbara Literary Journal); Laure-Anne Bosselaar (These Many Rooms, 2019); Karen Haddigan www.datingafterfifty.com (Secrets of Dating After Fifty: The Insider's Guide to Finding Love Again, 2018); Marcia Meier @MarciaMeier (Author, Editor, & Publisher); Aaron Shulman @amshulman (The Age of Disenchantments: The Epic Story of Spain's Most Notorious Literary Family and the Long Shadow of the Spanish Civil War, 2019); Rebecca Villarreal (The Amazing Adventures of Selma Calderon: A Globetrotting Magical Mystery of Courage, Food & Friendship (Truth & Magic), 2015); Ellen O’Connell Whittet @oconnellwhittet (What You Become in Flight, 2020). (at Santa Barbara, California) https://www.instagram.com/p/B7G4RXSF5iq/?igshid=p60dqpkufzab

"Stillbirth" by Laure-Anne Bosselaar.