MAUREEN THORSON
Maureen Thorson is 25, lives in New York City, and when she tossed her cares to the wind, she was fined for littering.
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THE BAD POEM
Here is the bad poem.
Written to beat a quota,
A literary gesture on
Par with a smirk.
It contains that self-same
Laziness as the bum
Who came out of the alley shadows
To demand a dollar for helping
You park your car, after you already
Parked it alone. Remember
Him grinning in the dark.
Give me a dollar or I key your
Door. Next to you, the poem wheedles,
Let me slide, or
My words will only
Become more sly, inflated
With fatuous metaphors,
Jerry-rigged and insincere. Dangerous, too,
Like any liar bold enough to lie in your face,
Grinning there in the Sunday night dark.
And it could be so easy, see:
Just give him what he wants
And you can both get out of here.
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THIS VERSE IS CLOSED
I decided to read them all at a go-
An entire collection of poetics,
Starting with Charles Olson
Describing closed and open verse.
He likes parentheses, or
Rather he likes to open them and
Not close. As though their curves
Were a series of doors, leading
You deeper into his words. And suddenly-
Mwa ha ha! laughs Charles Olson,
Shrieking like a B-Grade movie villain
as you scream something that echoes
“For the love of God, Montressor!”
He giggles and echoes you back,
“For the love of God,” as he bricks up
His last parenthetical behind you.
How could you have been so stupid?
No door opens but it can be closed-
And he had to be hiding those close
Parentheses somewhere. And
why not here?-in this lonely basement,
In a pile behind the crates of sherry,
Stacked and aromatic and so deliciously final
While overhead, the carnival rages on?
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CALAMITY MEETS BULIN
Bulin was dead, it seems, at last.
Calamity went to his funeral service,
Saw his hundred yellow
Grandsons, weeping out their
Almond eyes, sniffling in
Their queues.
Bulin was laid out there in state,
Filling out his diamond coffin, only
Pretending to be dead. Every
Once in the while you could
Catch him blinking,
But that was just at night.
For the most part he was still,
Though it cost him half his life
Not to laugh. Calamity
Took out her gun
And shot him in the forehead.
Her gun shot only blanks, but
Bulin’s brow began to bloom
With a deep welt and the trickle
Of his own red blood.
Blood fresh from a corpse! The cry
went up, and Calamity leaned
Into Bulin’s coffin, as the
Hundred yellow grandsons
Stood gaping.
“Now you’re a miracle,” she said.