Poems heavy with rejection
sink into a trashbin
clearly marked for recycling —
my discarded lines no longer
litter in a landfill,
sludge on the ocean floor.
but serving, at last, a useful purpose.
Here’s thought for food:
I grind them out,
they grind them up
into takeout cups
instant boxlunch
throwaway trays for thruway snackers.
Drink in my mangled words,
an Acropolis cup of Aegean blue,
eat from my cast-off prosody!
Scraps to snacks to scraps again,
I offer America my own moveable feast.
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About Maria Terrone
Maria Terrone’s nonfiction has appeared in such publications as Witness, Green Mountains Review, The Common, Briar Cliff Review, Potomac Review, The Evansville Review and Litro (U.K.), and her prose, commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, was performed in its stillspotting nyc project. Bordighera Press will publish her first book of creative nonfiction, At Home in the New World, in 2018.
Also a poet, Terrone is the author of the collections Eye to Eye; A Secret Room in Fall (McGovern Prize, Ashland Poetry Press); The Bodies We Were Loaned, and a chapbook, American Gothic, Take 2. Magazines including Poetry and Ploughshares and more than 25 anthologies have featured her Pushcart Prize-nominated work. In 2015 she became the poetry editor of the journal Italian Americana.