Deborah Bogen
Dakota Omphalos
Bare-skinned and beaconish,
sudden,
(like mushrooms)
silos watch over
Dakota’s high plains.
A stringent frugal beauty, ours,
the attic window’s bruisey glow,
a vaulted stillness painted shut,
but there you’ll find the shoebox fat with photos,
Granny slim, the girl she’d been aproned,
sky-blown,
hanging sheets like
sails that can’t catch wind.
Spirits here don’t let things hold except
the silos, mitered grain.
Long shadows they cast out —
and then at nightfall
reel us in again.
Dakota Migraine
Eye-light cast darkly down
through flat-fingered windmill blades,
across the barnyard’s ruddy cheek —
stark satire of poetry’s stare
and the mind’s enigmatic architecture.
Conclusions founder here,
ground to exfoliating bits by
compost,
by roosters
and the shadows of roosters.
Bio
Bogen's most recent book, Let Me Open You a Swan, won the 2009 Antivenom Prize from Elixir Press. Her previous Landscape With Silos won the 2005 XJ Kennedy Poetry Prize and an earlier chapbook, Living by the Children's Cemetery, won the 2000 ByLine Press Competition. Her website is www.DeborahBogen.net.