To the Artist's Page 
To our home page
To Laurel Ann Bogen's next pieceImprint, May 1970 1. I tell you the skin alone cannot contain the brawl of a generation --- we burned flags before the helmets and the dogs rabid with our parents' teeth. Then we locked arms, swaying and cheered when the match struck. We watched, swore the jelly of napalm would not silence the corpses pulled from rice paddies in another world We thought our skin could still contain the body blows, the clubs and guns that struck down one by one by one by one 2. I shuffled through white china rows of lunchtime professors my black armband for the dead the frat boys on scholarship carrying thick-skinned pudding trays of coffee and cream counted the days until graduation Mao and a map of Canada hidden in their back pockets 3. A girl on the television in the foyer bent down, transfixed, screaming skin stretched taut to the corners her arms outstretched, protesting the body of the sprawled boy before her blood seeps from sinew to dermis her young face twists when the camera clicks like a bullet in a chamber of the heart and we are naive as though fists had never bruised us before I stopped dropped the sheets of colored paper like blood flowering on the four-cornered floor 4. They say even Nixon broke when they started killing the students the rupture of skin splitting open a wound he could not stitch together so when they told me it was over I didnšt believe them that scar on membrane and flesh smoothing over but will not slough off
To the top of this page