by Maureen Tolman Flannery
The insular life finds it surprisingly easy
to sleep through
remote imploding of bedroom walls,
throbbing in some phantom limb
missing from another man’s body,
blood it cannot see
turning the dust vermillion
on a distant road
it feels certain it will never
have to travel down.
Maureen Tolman Flannery’s Ancestors in the Landscape: Poems of a Rancher’s DaughterA Fine Line was also published this year and produced as musical theatre. Her other books are Secret of the Rising Up: Poems of Mexico; Remembered Into Life; and the anthology Knowing Stones: Poems of Exotic Places. Her work has appeared in forty anthologies and over a hundred literary reviews, recently including Midwest Quarterly Review, Amherst Review, Calyx, Atlanta Review, and North American Review. was nominated for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Although she grew up in a Wyoming sheep ranch family, Maureen and her actor husband Dan have raised their four children in Chicago.