I-70 Review


Writing and Art from the Middle and Beyond


Deborah Bogen

Deborah Bogen's most recent book, Let Me Open You a Swan, won the 2010 Elixir Press Antivenom Award. Her first book Landscape With Silos, was a 2004 National Poetry Series finalist and won the 2005 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, judged by Betty Adcock. In 2002 Edward Hirsch selected her chapbook, Living by the Children's Cemetery, as the ByLine Press Competition winner.


     Bogen's poems and reviews appear widely in journals like Crazyhorse, Shenandoah, Ploughshares, and New Letters. She has been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and her work was selected by Poetry Daily for inclusion in their hardcopy anthology.  Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and she's won the Peregrine Prize, the Los Angeles Poetry in the Windows Prize and a Best of the Net for individual poems.


     As an undergraduate Bogen studied philosophy at Pitzer College, but was lucky enough to spend one semester at Oberlin College where she was exposed to the teaching and the poetry of Stuart Friebert and David Young. Her first poem was published in Oberlin's student magazine, The Plum Creek Review, the same month the Kent State shootings closed campuses and sent students to Washington D.C. to march. After that march she dropped out of college, but continued to subscribe to Field, a reading experience that educated her and kept her going during many years of raising children, making a living as a paralegal and working on social issues like educating suburbia about the effects of Nuclear Power Plants. She did not write poetry again until she was kindly advised by Stuart Friebert to “read with a pencil in (her) hand.”


     At forty-seven Bogen began to write poetry seriously. She learned incredible amounts in a long-term community writing group led by the poet Doug Anderson. She continued Anderson's tradition, leading groups of her own for fifteen years. These days she lives in Pittsburgh PA with her husband, the philosopher of science, Jim Bogen.

Crows


                   He said John, immediately


                   the crows appeared.


                   Not sad, I said, I'm not.



                   He said, in case of emergency

  

                   call. A leaf fell.


                   We danced until two


                   He said he lived over



                    a truck stop, said,


                   these particular crows


                   are trouble's handprint.



                   I remembered Robert,

  

                   before him Michael,


                   room 208,


                   wallets on dressers,



                   in case of emergency


                   please notify,


                   the phone rang, black



                   like crows, sky seeped in,


                  singed, vagrant.  

                  I don't sing, I said.


                  I do everything but that.



                  He said, keep this


                  in a safe place, said, in case


                  of emergency.



                  The fistful of crows flickered,


                  black, eating holes


                  in the windows,


                  a kind of notification,



                  a kind of emergency,


                  a kind of slipping away.


                  And the wallet lay open



                  on the window,


                  the glass emptied itself,


                  a stain in the back


                  of my throat,



                   the taste of wet wood.


                  The windows cracked,


                   crows flew through



                   making holes not in the sky,


                   but in the world.


                   I said John, I said,


                   please notify,



                   there's an emergency.


                  The crows wheeled


                   above us, a circular saw.


The Migraine's Art


Blackwork --


this wanting to unravel, to travel lonely at the edge of the road


yoked to an undiscovered purpose, wintry


and so far gone


this is me, the mist, this ashy unraveling chained


to the axe in my crown


                                               harried by heaven's hurt


and craving a beggar's bed


          for the fox is out and bells are tolling fire,


or priests,


their knuckles a nick in my skull.


Migraine Without Aura


Nota Bene: No stars this time, just


Buddha's knife parting my hair beneath a sky airbrushed


and impotent as my spackled skull and my


stuttering attempts at ignition.



Gone to the void, I'm bared to God's fistic gaze,


a bitch straining her chain as the surgical needle bores through


-- but this time, no lights,


the windows of heaven are painted shut.



Alone I barter, a stake driven down to a vaulted


stillness, to me other,


my stone-


life.


Autopsy: To See For Yourself

     


In the vault the Master lays the body on the table.


Tenderly he lifts the knife exposing the parts,     touching the


body to put a lesson on it, noting     the way the clavicle's fixed


with a glue that hardens


like the gum that holds butterfly eggs to a branch.


In the cloister, students gather bringing bread     and wine.


They have come seeking a lesson.     Amid the sweat and


sweetness they work to decipher


the body, to see what is glued together, what floats     in its


oily waters. And you are also here, witness


to these rituals, the aligning of descendant with


descendant, cause with cause. Sometimes there's


a flickering in the light that falls on the scene.


Sometimes the whole flock lifts.