Maryann Corbett’s
poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Measure, The Evansville Review, The Dark Horse, and other journals in print and online.
Her chapbook Gardening in a Time of War was published in 2007 by Pudding House.
She works as a legal-writing adviser, editor, and indexer for the Minnesota Legislature.
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Collision Course
Geezus Christ! She hears herself, in the crosswalk,
scream it as the SUV aims straight at her,
driver blank, oblivious, on his cell phone,
missing by inches.
Crossed now, shaky, gasping to get her breath back,
back it comes: the names, how he’d always used them—
sacred names—as though they were punctuation.
How it had pained her,
her, his little Catholic-school-perfect daughter,
all that Christ and Jesus and God almighty.
How his swings of punchy vocabulary
born of the Navy
stunned her like a right to the jaw and left her
woozy, reeling. How it was all downhill then,
straight to hell from there, through a tight-lipped, sullen,
tense adolescence—
What? Oh yes, I’m fine—only startled. Thank you.
Really, I’m okay. She’ll move on. She’ll wonder,
later, why from nowhere a memory smacked her
flat to the pavement.
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