|
Maureen O'Brien
>>read her poem
Maureen O’Brien received a grant from Barbara Deming Memorial Fund/Money for Women to work on her novel, b-mother, which was published by Harcourt Trade earlier this year. b-mother will be translated into German and Italian and has been selected by the New York Public Library as a Best Teen Read of 2007. The movie rights were sold to Lifetime Original Movies.
O’Brien’s poems and stories have appeared in various magazines, including Hurricane Alice, Kalliope, How(ever), Earth’s Daughters, and The Louisville Review, The Lilliput Review and forthcoming in Hard Ground III: Writing the Rockies. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies Through a Child’s Eyes; Mother’s Nature; and I Am Becoming the Woman I’ve Wanted, which received an American Book Award. She received an Honorable Mention in the Robert Penn Warren Award, judged by Yusef Komunyakaa, and is included in the Anthology of New England Writers 200.
O’Brien has taught writing at St. Joseph College, the University of Hartford, and Trinity College and currently teaches at the Greater Hartford academy of the Arts and teaches creative writing to elementary and middle school children for Bushnell Partners.
For more information on Carlow University’s MFA program, contact Dr. Ellie Wymard at 412-578-6346.
Dobler Award
Incoming Wounded
by Maureen O’Brien
Sweet cool wind, an “Ave Maria” radio station
in a motel room where the phone doesn’t work,
you pissed near the Pentagon, in a river of snow melting.
Through the thin sheetrock we hear the army chaplain
shaming the earless soldier into praying,
while after touching you I trace the trenches of my stretch marks
and we vanish in the dark
biker bar. Amputees file past. My fishnets slide
down my legs: you, too, have come home wounded,
your electric wheelchair wheezes while carrying us.
In the cold rain I make you stop and turn to me. I say,
“I am so in love with you,
I’ve been in love with you all along,
I don’t care what you feel in return.” And while you watch from under
a tarp I bob in the grimy motel pool.
I dry off near the busted gate. A doe comes right up to me,
rubbing her face near mine, and making whistling sounds.
When I found out you had been blown apart,
I did not sleep for days.
Finally I slipped under and I dreamt
that I peered inside my own birth canal and saw our baby’s face,
it was the face that has been here forever
all the way back through thousands of wars:
living, dying, becoming whole again,
longing to shred me open and be born.
Back to top |
