Maureen Tolman Flannery’s
latest books are Ancestors in the Landscape: Poems of a Rancher’s Daughter and A Fine Line. Although she grew up in a Wyoming sheep ranch family, Maureen and her actor husband Dan have raised their four children in Chicago.
Her work has appeared in forty anthologies and over a hundred literary reviews, recently including Birmingham Poetry Review, Xavier Review, Calyx, The Pedestal, Atlanta Review, Out of Line, and North American Review.
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Death by Poetry
When they opened her up
she was riddled with poems.
They didn’t even try to transcribe.
They just sewed her up again and sent her home.
Three months later in the spring of the year
she died of poems,
her body alive with them—
protest poems in her spleen
love sonnets in both auricles of her enlarged heart
arteries clogged with blockage
her lungs so cloudy with poems
each breath must have been a labor
her breasts, hard as on the third day
when the milk comes in,
engorged with poems she could not let down
safe poems in situ—haiku tightly formed and cyclic
ruptured poems spilling infectious mixed metaphor
into her abdominal cavity
an ectopic poem that could not gestate,
ready to burst the tube
that stretched in holding in its will to life,
parasitic poems
plagiarized and feeding on the good bacteria
one last magnificent poem, almost spoken,
lodged in her throat like a piece of steak.
Say only
that she died of beauty undigested
like rough rubies
and we need only read her death
to be gifted of it all.
[Originally published in Buffalo Bones and reprinted
in CQ California Quarterly, Pudding, Margins, and Poetryfish]
Artist’s Statement
W
hen I wrote “Death by Poetry,” I was a forty-eight year old mother of four with a full-time job and two part-time careers. I had always written poetry between the cracks, shared it occasionally with family and friends, and stuffed it away into a dark, unorganized drawer of an undusted antique dresser. The poem “Death by Poetry” was inspired by the untimely death of an artist friend. It occurred to me how many potential paintings perished with him. But, after I had written the poem, I realized that it was really about my own devalued art form
and the truth I was experiencing—namely, that inspiration ignored can be fatal to the soul.
Not long after the writing of that poem I began to submit for publication to various journals and anthologies. With a lifetime of work waiting for notice, I had hundreds of poems to choose from, and soon realized how essential to the health of my writing was the completion of the cycle. Writer, editors, readers, we feed and are
nourished by each other.
It has been an exciting aspect of the joy of self-expression, finding homes for the poems I continue to write. I have since published many hundreds of poems in a wide variety of venues. I firmly believe that each of us has some form of art we are
destined to bring to fruition. The unacknowledged muse can take revenge upon our well-being. I have no more sublimated fears that all my hidden work might explode from collapsing lungs with my death rattle.
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