Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art
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    • Isobel O'Hare, "Failure: A Love Letter"
    • Melissa Wiley, "Barbed Wire Fence"
    • Ashley Wilkinson, "fractional distillation"
  • Art
Picture

Matthew Henriksen

The Story of God


I texted my ex and after a few days she responded with a nothing
That brought me back to nothing

I realize I am in love with poetry

This afternoon a blue jay flew up from the road
And away from the car
Then back at the car and nearly into the window

I said so to my daughter
In her car seat and she laughed and said Daddy that’s a trick
And I tried to explain there are things we don’t
See because of where we are sitting
I said sometimes birds fly into cars

And because I am in love with poetry and not my own break up
I don’t want what I said to my daughter to mean anything

But unlike my ex my daughter responds
Laughing and she doesn’t believe me when I say
Birds can fly into cars
And her laughing and my inability to explain one small possible reality
Sort of let the car float for a moment
Above the daylight into a thicker liquid light

The metaphor can’t relate to me if the initial image is just a trick
As my daughter says

We bought squirt guns and she ran around the park shooting trees
She shot up the trees and ran all over the grass
And climbed down to the creek and took off her shoes and walked in the water
And threw the biggest rocks she could lift from the creek
Back into the creek bed

I watched her as I held my phone
And wanted to tell her that she is a trick
That blue jays are not real
And the creek is not full of water
That she cannot throw a rock into the same creek once

When she has grown tired of the wind beating her car
As she drives on the interstate away from a disaster
I can’t imagine now, I imagine
She will see that the past is empty of us
And the world unfolds until it isn’t a world

Just lint from someone else’s hamper

But how do we throw that away
When it’s the world




Picture
Matthew Henriksen’s first book, Ordinary Sun, appeared on Black Ocean in 2011, and a second is coming from the same press in 2015.  Recent poems appear in Brooklyn Rail, HTML Giant, Agriculture Reader, The Cultural Society, N/A, Ampersand Review, Apartment, Yalobusha Review, and Timber Journal.  He co-edits the online poetry journal Typo, sporadically publishes Cannibal, a hand-bound literary journal, and runs The Burning Chair Readings.  He currently lives in the Arkansas Ozarks and works at the Dickson Street Bookshop.

published by
The Department of English
College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
The William Paterson University of New Jersey
Copyright © 2012-2022 Map Literary
Map Literary

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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