Maura MacDonald

OED

“Love, n.2 -Any one of a set of transverse beams supporting the spits in a smokehouse for curing herring” (Oxford English Dictionary).

A perfect world is one where
the man who reads the whole of the OED
falls tumblingly, madly in love

with the woman who has 20,000 dictionaries.

I read about them both
in a newspaper article,
which also mentioned his girlfriend,
who does not have 20,000 dictionaries.
Perhaps they’re both happy,
and living how they should,
or he’s repellent,
or she’s repellent,
and they’d just hate each other
in the end.
But I can’t help thinking
it would be

the greatest love story
ever told.

///////////

Giving away every day

It isn’t that I hate myself

want to keep my genes from spreading,

to protect the earth from evil human hands.

No, I’m too selfish,

for a sacrifice like that.

I simply can’t stomach the thought

of something living—

squirming and twisting

inside my insides.

Leeching every bit of me away—

shifting my very structure,

just so I can be prepared to give away

every day.

My mother told me once

that she would take a bullet for me—

as though that would inspire

some deeply buried maternal instinct.

As though letting go of our lives,

and deaths,

is something to be cheered.

Maura MacDonald

Bio:

Maura Mac Donald graduated from Roanoke College in 2008, where they gave me an absurdly large piece of paper that says I know things about English. I’m currently in Oxford (the one in England) where I’m learning some things about publishing from Oxford Brookes University. As a part of my publishing degree, I’m in the process of putting together the first issue of my poetry magazine Quintessential, which will hopefully continue long after the course ends. While I’m doing all this learning I like to knit, drink tea, curse, and write poems.

Writing quote:

I tried to think of a deep and meaningful quote about writing, and I know I’ve read and heard quite a few, but I keep coming back to something one of my professors told me about one of my poems “It’s a great poem,” she said “but you really need to smut up the beginning,” and she was right. So I suppose the lesson in that is to not be afraid to take your poems where they need to go; either that or to put more smut in.