Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art
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    • NJ High School Writing Contest
    • Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award
    • NJ Undergraduate Writing Contest
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    • Links
    • WPU MFA
  • Nonfiction
    • Jill Darling, "Linger Here"
    • Charles Tarlton, "Har Mĕgiddōn (הר מגידו): The Coming American Fiasco"
    • Martha Wiseman, "Loose Ends"
    • Jan Jolly, "Through My Father's Glasses"
    • Kristina Moriconi, "Still Looking"
    • Wm. Anthony Connolly, "IGY"
    • Cal Freeman, "Loosestrife"
    • Jim Daniels
    • W.F. Lantry, "The Strange Beauty of the Unfamiliar"
    • Michael Roloff, "Accretion"
    • Andrew Sunshine, "John Hancock's John Hancock"
    • Diane Payne, "3 micro memoirs"
    • Luc Sante, "Flesh and Bone"
    • Isobel O'Hare, "Failure: A Love Letter"
    • Melissa Wiley, "Barbed Wire Fence"
    • Ashley Wilkinson, "fractional distillation"
  • Poetry
    • Orion Allen
    • Mark DeCarteret 2024
    • Mary Christine Delea
    • Kara Lewis
    • Jim Daniels
    • Martine van Bijlert
    • Adam Day
    • Sunday T. Saheed
    • Alexandria Peary 2023
    • Fiona Lu
    • Harley Chapman
    • Richard Ryal
    • Sherwood Anderson
    • Mark DeCarteret
    • Dennis Hinrichsen Poetry
    • Daniel Biegelson
    • Natan Last
    • Michael Chang
    • D E Steward
    • Benjamin Paloff Poetry
    • David Dodd Lee
    • Isabelle Doyle
    • Kathleen Heil
    • Leonard Kress
    • Lauren Tess
    • Cesca Janece Waterfield
    • Billy Cancel Poetry
    • Scott Minar
    • Mark Decarteret
    • Greg Glazner
    • Bruce McRae
    • Maureen Thorson
  • Fiction
    • On Experimental Fiction
    • Leonnard Menifee, "The Long, Long Ice Picks At the Old Frostee Freeze"
    • Maisy Phelps, "Marina and Marina and Marina and Marina"
    • Mary Lewis, "Red Knees"
    • Anna Mantzaris, "Strange Magic"
    • Ross Kimberlin, "The Queen of Emilys"
    • Mark Cassidy, "How I Met My Wife"
    • Emily Trachtenberg, "Plum"
    • Hector Donovan-Gonzalez
    • Christopher Linforth, "Zia"
    • Jenessa Abrams, "You Never Wish That Upon Anyone"
    • Eros Livieratos, "On Feeling"
    • Halsted M. Bernard, "Your Hands"
    • Justin Meckes, "The Gash"
    • Reb Livingston, from "Bombyonder"
    • Craig Foltz, "Without Stigma"
  • Art
Picture


Alexandria Peary

Instant Transmission of Knowledge

In 1982,
Wolf Man Jack
counted down “greatest hits”
from 40, 40 Solid Gold
puddles at the Top of the Charts
from the alarm-clock radio,
the sound of the dryer shuffling
for Saturday laundry
while wolf spiders
rode on the top of my head
though no one told  me
as I went to my Psycho shower scene,
a pre-teen.

In Amherst, MASS,
I had a pet leaf
called Called Back
that followed me everywhere
a red asterisk on October sky
The angora bush
of loneliness stood on the porch
of the apartment complex
ringing the doorbell,
the fraternity next door got a keg.
Loreal Paris 6R, Light Auburn, Warmer
Revlon 56, Brilliant Bordeaux but Brown
Emily Dickinson had auburn hair
apparently or strawberry blonde
like an oak leaf
apart from its tree.

Leaning back against the railing
on the unpainted deck
the merlot has gone to my head
while someone grills eggplant
and we talk about whether evil
exists or if it’s a type of social interaction,
the gray climbs upward
into Minerva, Pamela,
Reverend 2013 (Called)
of First Parish U-U
in Scituate, MASS,
who has gone gray,
unpainted pole the gray climbs upward




The Mou-Mou of Enlightenment

An unusually fat person, “too big for real
clothes, more suited to tents. Crocs
are the footwear of choice,
” says Urban Dictionary.

A mou-mou:
Memorandum of Understanding
Minutes of Use
Erica Mou, the Italian singer, and Mou Rong
of the Tang Dynasty. Mou Forest
in Burkina Faso, in Africa,
a country Borges could have made up,
lists this disambiguation page.
Here is the hem of the muumuu of understanding
with blue & brown known flowers:

Mohammad Moumou in Stockholm,
a sleeping agent. Of traffic at night,
when in Iowa City, when with poets of understanding,
Codeine & beer make excellent sunflowers.
Go-go boots at the back of the closet:
pegs run up them. Like an indoor climbing wall.




Mixed Border

1.

A mixed border
of October and AM
of a M-W-F schedule
and irises and
the smattering flat
terry of silk violets,
happy flappy faces
to end-of-life care:
end of the line
as adjective or as noun,
colorless periods
strung together,
now unstoppable:
moves at right angles
around the blank acre.
Like an Etch-a-Sketch
it forms the north side
of an old house, a “connected
farm”:  big house, little house
(also called an ell)
back house / carriage house
to the livestock barn
a house that dis
appears when shaken,

[The following doesn’t go away after a few more shakes.]

two short lines
under the windows,
the eyes of the house:
flower boxes for emphasis 2

alongside the handicap ramp
and the driveway
paved over for tourists
making a hand rail

and a mail box that’s been drawn in
with an actual address
that receives junk mail: 3
flyers about local gyms,
car sales, above-
ground swimming pools.


2.

A decorative border
of fruit and flowers
from odes from elegy,
of nuts and berries
from the roadside stand
from the poet’s working farm
the not-for-human consumption
beside necessary daily intake
gourds spray painted gold

3   then flags and flowers,
pumpkins and pinwheels,
red-apple-for-the-teacher
like a stenciled conversation
from stationary inside the mail box,
as seasons become holidays.
It starts where the farm house left

off, forms garden plots
of Spyrograph flowers,
raised vegetable beds,
it draws in the next house lot,
it lives the life it lives,
it heads down a road
which it has made.

2               but also a blur in the flower box
                 b/c of a few extra r’s




Ring Tones
 
Black branch of footsteps overhead
giggle-colored blossoms along a sleeve

the flowers are typed on the kimono
Glenn Gould mumbled, left marks above

Bach and Mozart, that inlaid forest
of topaz and ruby and emerald

I pull a peel-away strip of diacritics
from over a mother & son at the kitchen counter

a band of  stick figures  dancing
inside the long-division problem

smoky italics above the hills
sunflowers like cushions along the couch

bright threads of chickadeebluejaygoldfinchcardinal
in a needlepoint of a porch gone winter-white

branch of footsteps overheard in the woods
quotation marks around a single leaf it rings like a bell





Picture
Alexandria Peary’s third book, Control Bird Alt Delete, won the 2013 Iowa Poetry Prize. Her other books include Fall Foliage Called Bathers & Dancers, Lid to the Shadow, and the forthcoming Creative Writing Pedagogies for the 21st Century (co-edited with Tom C. Hunley). She has creative nonfiction appearing at Superstition Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Guernica Magazine, and the New England Review and maintains a mindful writing blog at alexandriapeary.blogspot.com.

published by
The MFA in Creative and Professional Writing Program
Department of Language, Literature, Culture, and Writing

College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
The William Paterson University of New Jersey
Copyright © 2012-2025 Map Literary
Map Literary

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  • About
    • Masthead
    • Submissions
    • NJ High School Writing Contest
    • Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award
    • NJ Undergraduate Writing Contest
    • In Print
    • Subscribe
    • Internship Opportunity
    • Links
    • WPU MFA
  • Nonfiction
    • Jill Darling, "Linger Here"
    • Charles Tarlton, "Har Mĕgiddōn (הר מגידו): The Coming American Fiasco"
    • Martha Wiseman, "Loose Ends"
    • Jan Jolly, "Through My Father's Glasses"
    • Kristina Moriconi, "Still Looking"
    • Wm. Anthony Connolly, "IGY"
    • Cal Freeman, "Loosestrife"
    • Jim Daniels
    • W.F. Lantry, "The Strange Beauty of the Unfamiliar"
    • Michael Roloff, "Accretion"
    • Andrew Sunshine, "John Hancock's John Hancock"
    • Diane Payne, "3 micro memoirs"
    • Luc Sante, "Flesh and Bone"
    • Isobel O'Hare, "Failure: A Love Letter"
    • Melissa Wiley, "Barbed Wire Fence"
    • Ashley Wilkinson, "fractional distillation"
  • Poetry
    • Orion Allen
    • Mark DeCarteret 2024
    • Mary Christine Delea
    • Kara Lewis
    • Jim Daniels
    • Martine van Bijlert
    • Adam Day
    • Sunday T. Saheed
    • Alexandria Peary 2023
    • Fiona Lu
    • Harley Chapman
    • Richard Ryal
    • Sherwood Anderson
    • Mark DeCarteret
    • Dennis Hinrichsen Poetry
    • Daniel Biegelson
    • Natan Last
    • Michael Chang
    • D E Steward
    • Benjamin Paloff Poetry
    • David Dodd Lee
    • Isabelle Doyle
    • Kathleen Heil
    • Leonard Kress
    • Lauren Tess
    • Cesca Janece Waterfield
    • Billy Cancel Poetry
    • Scott Minar
    • Mark Decarteret
    • Greg Glazner
    • Bruce McRae
    • Maureen Thorson
  • Fiction
    • On Experimental Fiction
    • Leonnard Menifee, "The Long, Long Ice Picks At the Old Frostee Freeze"
    • Maisy Phelps, "Marina and Marina and Marina and Marina"
    • Mary Lewis, "Red Knees"
    • Anna Mantzaris, "Strange Magic"
    • Ross Kimberlin, "The Queen of Emilys"
    • Mark Cassidy, "How I Met My Wife"
    • Emily Trachtenberg, "Plum"
    • Hector Donovan-Gonzalez
    • Christopher Linforth, "Zia"
    • Jenessa Abrams, "You Never Wish That Upon Anyone"
    • Eros Livieratos, "On Feeling"
    • Halsted M. Bernard, "Your Hands"
    • Justin Meckes, "The Gash"
    • Reb Livingston, from "Bombyonder"
    • Craig Foltz, "Without Stigma"
  • Art