I’d rather tell you a better story, but
disease and boredom and a bad connection
brought that plan to night. You took off
with the oranges and spiders,
the ending and the plot, and left me
with the Zenith’s chrome housing,
the cruise shits in their moorings.
The tender tourists with their trinkets
and tight-fisted maps. The orphans
and beachheads, so lovelorn and solemn.
The satellites’ red signals. The hotel’s
common gestures. Once you were gone,
there were only these few things left.
a necessary satellite signal made of a uniquely singular ache and echo
Ada Limon
Maureen Thorson is a poet, publisher, and book designer living in Washington, D.C. She is the author of a number of chapbooks, including Twenty Questions for the Drunken Sailor (2009), Mayport (2006), which won the Poetry Society of America’s National Chapbook Fellowship, and Novelty Act (Ugly Duckling Presse 2004). Her poems can be found in many anthologies and journals, including the forthcoming Yale Anthology of Younger American Poets, Exquisite Corpse, Hotel Amerika, LIT, The Hat, and 6×6. Maureen is the publisher and editor of Big Game Books, a small press dedicated to emerging poets. She is also the co-curator of the In Your Ear reading series at the DC Arts Center and the founder of NaPoWriMo, an annual project in which poets attempt to write a poem a day for the month of April.
Maureen Thorson reading at the Segue Series
Book Trailer (YouTube)
For the Special Edition Broadside & Book click here.
Print/Ephemera, Special Edition
Publication Date: February 15 2011
Distribution: Direct Only