Marilyn Annucci is the author of two chapbooks: Waiting Room, which won the 2012 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, selected by Tony Hoagland (Hill-Stead Museum, 2012) and Luck (Parallel Press, 2000). Her work has appeared in various journals online and in print, including Dogwood, The Sow’s Ear, Verse Wisconsin, Umbrella Journal, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, North American Review, Wisconsin People & Ideas, qarrtsiluni, 5 am, and Indiana Review. She is an associate professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater.

Order her new chapbook, Waiting Room, directly from Marilyn or through the Hill-Stead Museum. Two sample poems from the book: “Wrecked World” “Allen Ginsberg” Tony Hoagland had this to say about the book: “There’s a wry compassion for the human in all of the various, exquisite poems in this collection. Sometimes the speaker is the one on the cross, or at the crossroads, sometimes it is a stray dog, or a loved one with Parkinson’s. The imagination is our angel, the speaker knows, and language is the unsentimental, inventive, tender genius that makes poems like this possible. Superb work.” Marilyn can be reached at Annuccim@uww.edu or annuccim@aol.com

Crawl Spaces

The world is full of closure,
pocked with cracks and pin holes
only air and voices and mites fit through.
Not me. Not you.

Big enough to read words, we cannot rest
inside a wrist watch, snug as a button-sized battery.

We can drive enormous cars.
We can pull from grocery shelves clunky boxes
and drop them in carts.
We even can swipe with ease a plastic card
through a machine’s narrow slot.

But not one of us clunkers can slip in,
brave the walls of the magnetic strip—
horribly narrow, never not dark.

So I wonder what the moon sees,
or the moony God, higher than planes
when he looks down
on the cool grains of porch lights
and we are crying in our giant bathrooms.