Abiquiú — Blackbird Archive

← v8n2, Fall 2009

I was watching Jupiter’s moons through a telescope, 7000 feet in the air, sea level

a sweet tail of memory, and Jupiter was giving the impression of

and I kept waiting for the end of the world as we know it. It came the last night,

the night I bargained my soul for, the extra, unexpected one. The

footsteps came without surprise and there were so many people angry at me for

taking this chance on the mountain at night alone: Didn’t you know

you’d be scared, they said, and tsk tsk: stern mothers. My heart quickened, like in

vampire stories, and quickening, as we know, always leads to

nature solitude mortality

Maureen Seaton

Maureen Seaton’s recent publications include her sixth solo poetry collection Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009), a poetry chapbook America Loves Carney (Sow’s Ear, 2009), and a memoir Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Her previous collections include Venus Examines Her Breast (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2004), winner of the Publisher Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award; Little Ice Age (Invisible Cities Press, 2001); and Furious Cooking (University of Iowa Press, 1996), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. She coedited, with Denise Duhamel and David Trinidad, the anthology Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull Press, 2006). Her work, both solo and collaborative, has appeared in The Atlantic , The New Republic , The Paris Review , Green Mountains Review , Prairie Schooner , and BLOOM, among other journals. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship in poetry and two Pushcart Prizes for individual poems, Seaton teaches poetry, literary collage, and collaboration at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida.