Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art
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Picture

JOE LENNON

The United States 2


The United States 2

2. I promised the gun shape of Oklahoma I would write this poem
if it stayed right there, quiet, all summer. It did

so I did.

2. West Virginia doesn’t deserve this: to be out here, bullied by these big rectangular desert states.
To have its valleys sketched by memory by the clouds, awkward anvil heads

that may or may not shape rain.

2. Hawaska: something borrowed.

Alaii: something blue.

2. Which national razor is the most photogenic? The western edge of Arizona

or the eastern edge of Iraq?

2. You’ll understand too late the whole point, the hypotenuse of a two-buzzard-and-you triangle.
You’ll wonder how it came to be

you paid the Navajo Nation three bucks to be in four states at once.

2. Why do I keep taking perfectly good electricity and running it through squiggles? It would be
easier for I-40 to pass through Carmel instead of Needles

than for me to leave sprawl out of my sense of heaven.






Part 1


If you lose a fingernail it will grow back
anywhere on earth
in any size
its little white moon
That crease you’ve been feeling

is your ear.
If you lose a Matisse
within the masterpiece of whatever else
there is within 30 sec

there’s an effortless
billion
in the Tokyo
of slowly

how to be a coincidence
finally
to someone far away.
Vanilla

Godzilla
A wedding invitation arrives
during the course of an email
A bird has been found

down by the lake, surrounded
by its stomach
its stomach surrounded by rice that was dutifully thrown
not far enough

If you were meant to make someone in another country
happy
with something you write
this little moth
in simultaneously
two tin cans might be
monstrously
it
Your hand

battering away the instructions
for itself
Disappearing

is Remembering Part 1





______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Joe Lennon

Picture
Joe Lennon has visited all the US states that touch other ones, and none of the ones that don't. When he was nine his hometown newspaper published a poem he had written which included the line "and throw in Nancy Reagan's hair." Since then he's been traveling and writing. Right now he studies and teaches poetry at the University of Denver. 


published by
The Department of English
College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
The William Paterson University of New Jersey
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  • About
    • Masthead
    • Submissions
    • Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award
    • NJ High School Writing Contest
    • In Print
    • Subscribe
    • Links
    • Internship Opportunity
    • WPU MFA
  • Poetry
    • Richard Ryal
    • Sherwood Anderson
    • Mark DeCarteret
    • Dennis Hinrichsen Poetry
    • Daniel Biegelson
    • Natan Last
    • Jim Daniels Poetry
    • 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
    • Greg Glazner
    • Bruce McRae
    • Maureen Thorson
  • Fiction
    • On Experimental Fiction
    • 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"
  • Nonfiction
    • Martha Wiseman, "Loose Ends"
    • Jan Jolly, "Through My Father's Glasses"
    • Kristina Moriconi, "Still Looking"
    • Wm. Anthony Connolly, "IGY"
    • Cal Freeman, "Loosestrife"
    • 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"
  • Art