Laura Boss Reading at the Barron Art Center

Laura Boss was the featured poet of the PoetsWednesday poetry series in May, 2008. She was warmly received by the audience of poets, artists, students and poetry lovers. As she read poems about herself, her family and her lover, the audience, who'd traveled from Woodbridge, the Jersey Shore ann New York City to hear her, was captivated. Laura is a popular poet who's been featured at the Dodge Poetry Festival, the Long Branch and Walt Whitman Poetry Festivals in Ocean Grove and a featured reader in many Universities, schools and libraries throughout NJ. Last year she traveled to Wales where she read in Dykan Thomas' home. She was a featured poet in Diane Lockward's Girl TalkS. She co-hosts the Annual Poetry Intensive Weekend in Mendham with Maria Mazziotti Gillan. She's also the Editor of Lips magazine and winner of many NJ Council of the Arts awards.
Here is one of the poems Laura read at the Barron Arts Center

MATCHING URNS

I think how three weeks before surgery
I thought (as I cleaned my apartment in case Id

Didn’t make it so my mother wouldn’t have a

stroke when she first saw my place) how one of the

first things my first husband’s

second wife did after their marriage was to

get two places in a mausoleum so they would be
“together forever”(though in the traditional Jewish

religion I’m still married to him since we never had

a Jewish divorce—just the usual civil one)

And I think how I don’t have a place to be buried—
no plot way out in Long Island by my grandparents—
No plot nearer in Queens where my father and his parents
and his sisters are buried with only room left for my mother

What a pain for my kids at the time of grieving to

have to find some plot of dirt to dig me into—

How civilized if I am cremated and save them the

time and effort as well as cemetery trip—

lights on all the cars way out to Long Island

but the air conditioners probably off since the

cars are overheating from the ten mile an hour
funeral procession—No, perhaps a plot closer
to their apartments –but then so costly for them—

Yes, better and cheaper to be burnt up and my
ashes given to them in a tasteful urn in brown clay—
or perhaps pink enamel with little rosebuds with
daisies if they want to spring for it—

to be placed on a mantel.

But whose mantel?

Will my sons fight over who will get my ashes—
Will the fight be over who has to keep this depressing urn
on their mantel ( neither has a mantel)—

And how will their wives feel to have their mother-in-law

forever parked in their living room seeing the dust

or unvacuumed floors, a constant recrimination to them—

though she was never a housekeeper—

And perhaps my lover of ten years will want the urn—
After all, he is such a collector of cardboard boxes that
his VCR or an electric fan came in—

Will my ashes be fought over—
Will they third me up
So that one might have the ashes of my legs
with their slight varicose veins—or my head—

or breasts—

My younger son who kept his bottle until
he was five probably would get my breasts
No, I see my lover with these—He always admired them—
Now he can have their ashes—buy me a pretty black bra
from Victoria’s Secret catalogue and throw it in—take out the bra
when he yearns for me—No, the ashes on the bra would mess up
his place and he hates all dust with a passion—

No, I see him taking my ashes –to the relief

of both my sons—and especially their wives—

I see him putting my ashes in a matching urn
that he selected so carefully for his cat Kate—

I see our twin urns on his mantel—

My fate to be there next to this cat I was so
allergic to in life—seeing some new lover of his in a jealous
fit after he tearfully tells her ow much he loved
me after making love to her, this new lover
spitefully moving these two urns on the

bedroom mantel so that he is actually talking

to the cat when he remembers me—
and tenderly pats her urn

and calls her Laura

- Laura Boss

--from ARMS: New and Selected Poems