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Lauire-Anne Bosselaar grew up in Belgium, and moved to the United States in 1987. Fluent in four languages, she has also published poems in French and Flemish. She is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf and of Small Gods of Grief, which won the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry for 2001. Her third book, A New Hunger, will be published by Ausable Press in early 2007.

Among other publications, her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Washington Post, AGNI, Georgia Review and Harvard Review as well as in numerous anthologies. One of her poems won the National Poetry Contest, sponsored by I.E. magazine.

She was awarded a Fellowship at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, was a Writer in Residence at Hamilton College and at the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and at the Low Residency MFA Program at Pine Manor College.

She is the editor of Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants and Bars, Outsiders, Poems About Rebels Exiles and Renegades, Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City, and Never Before: Poems about First Experiences.

She and her husband, poet Kurt Brown, translated the work of Flemish poet Herman de Coninck: The Plural of Happiness (Field Translations Series). They live in New York City

Biography/Photo thanks to Famous Poems and Poets.com

Editor’s Note: In an earlier posting of Ms Bosselaar’s fine poem the formatting came unglued and distorted he fine poem “Friends.” The Chickasaw Plum regrets the errors. Jrg

Laure-Anne Bosselaar “Friends” from A New Hunger

Friends,

this is the viscous heart I hide from you:

gnashing, polluted, hooked to my ribs

like a burr, stuck there and stinging,

and it’s only 4:14 in the morning.

Those sudden shudders the waking alarm,

then the daily discipline of shutting away that heart,

shambling through the house, touching things,

stroking their shapes, as if it could help me

not be the Bad Sower’s daughter each morning,

the pit from a seed he sowed and left to parch,

and no crows would feed from it. So I lived. I don’t

want to explain this further, I’m done with it.

But this for you: on the days I hold your books,

read your letters, recall a gaze, the delicate

dangle of an earring, or the throwing

back of a head in laughter,

it’s you seeding the first beat into the heart

I open. And as the sun heaves daylight

into the parched tree by my window,

and rats burrow away, when pigeons come

down to feed on dust and pizza crusts, I thrum

the lit syllables of your names on my sill with all

ten fingers, typing them firmly into the brick,

and counting their beats, counting their beats.

Poetry Collections by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Poetry Anthologies Edited by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Translations by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Translated by Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown

© Laure-Anne Bosselaar. PUBLISHED BY Permmission OF THE AUTHOR.

Dim Sum is Mandarin for Happy Heart

--for undocumented kitchen workers

by John R. Guthrie

I. Kitchen.

Garlic, lemon grass, nutmeg and cloves.

As if from a censer scent the vacant alleyway beyond

As the vent fan high on the back rumbles.

Careful as kittens on the grease-slicked floor within,

Dumpling makers mince ghostly through the steam

Dish dogs, hands damp within their lemon yellow gloves,

Clatter dishes into the drying rack.

The fry cook from Beijing plunges a wire basket

Of breaded pork into the smoking Fryolater.

Lard bubbles, snarls, spits.

Damp hair protruding beneath his toque

Face shining damp, gold chain around his neck

White shirt an abstract canvas streaked sorrel and roseatte.

These are the priests of Jade Garden Dim Sum.

II. Stir Fry Cook

In the upright cooler cardboard crates

of Tsingtao beer, bottles green as malachite,

tinkle as the cooler hums its one note song.

Windows mist as he swings the door wide,

retrieves a hollowed chicken, naked, pale,

from between boxed sausage, red and sweet

and acorn colored tofu slabs.

Face stolid, he flops the bird upon the butcher block.

Like the woodsman’s axe, his gleaming cleaver glok-glok-gloks

Upon the worn wood, parts tossed into the wok,

slivered onions, peppers, celery, water chestnuts

He stirs the seething mix till fragrant onions

transmit revelation’s light.

III. Carver of Bitter Melon

Shoulders slumped, back humped, stick figure thin,

warming in his corner near the stove

cutting board with bowl and bitter melon perched on his knees.

seat a slatted wooden cabbage crate.

In muffled consonants and sing-song phrases of a homeland lost

the stir fry cook from Taipei cries, “Hurry up, Old Man,”

Face wrinkled as his bitter melon he carves

the old man, not looking up,

knobby hands deft as a sculptor’s

knife blade honed into a thin ellipse,

chops quicker; melon slices ping

into his bowl of steel.

IV. The Altar of the Kitchen God

On a small shelf above where Moloch with eight gas-flamed eyes hisses

there is a red bamboo bowl, sweet offerings for Tsao Wang,

pictured regal in embroidered robes on the wooden plaque behind.

“Bless the stove to make good food,” plead the ideograms

“that satisfied customers are happy and return.”

For the ancient carver of bitter melon

for the fry cook of damp and shining face

for flour dusted dumpling maker

for dish dogs damp from their labors

this is their altar of their devotions,

twelve hours of every day that comes.

--“Dim Sum” appears in this year’s Spindrift Literary Anthology.

Sir Thomas Wyatt, 1503-1642

None of Wyatt’s poems published during his life time.

I find no peace, and all my war is done

I find no peace, and all my war is done:
I fear, and hope; I burn, and freeze like ice;
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise;
And nought I have, and all the world I seize on;
That locketh nor loseth holdeth me in prison,
And holdeth me not, yet can I 'scape nowise:
Nor letteth me live, nor die at my devise,
And yet of death it giveth me occasion.
Without eyen I see, and without tongue I 'plain;
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health;
I love another, and thus I hate myself;
I feed me in sorrow, and laugh in all my pain.
Likewise displeaseth me both death and life,
And my delight is causer of this strife.

I carry your heart with me

By ee cummings

I carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart).

The Chickasaw Plum - Volume IV - Number 8 - August 2007

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