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2409 Jefferson Street
Port Townsend, WA
360-379-1086

Marjorie L. Manwaring

Two Poems

Marjorie Manwaring is a poet living in Seattle, where she also does freelance writing and editing, teaches poetry in the schools, and coedits the online poetry journal Switched-on Gutenberg. Her poems have appeared or will appear in journals such as the Seattle Review, Sentence, 5 AM, DMQ Review, Pontoon: An Anthology of Washington State Poets, and on the Seattle/King County Metro buses. Her manuscript Magic Word was a finalist for the 2004 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award, and she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2003 and 2004. Marjorie holds an MFA from Bennington College. 

____________________________

Treasure

Somewhere there’s a key, lost

in the rubble of a cobwebbed garage

or wedged in the corner of a moss-covered shed.

Who will find it, hold it in her hand,

rub away the rust and muck?

What you hope for—not treasure in a padlocked box

but another unlocking:

rush of strawberry air, hint of hay

that years ago kept you awake;

climbing down the fire ladder, over the gate,

meeting your best friend in moonlit pasture

to ride your father’s horses bareback—remember

how you’d turn toward home when you heard the horn

of the morning’s first ferry crossing the bay?

(originally published in Mirror Northwest)

*****************************************************

Weekly World News

When Bat Boy is finally found—eyes

unfocused, sixth sense rabidly

clicking away—sharing a cave with Elvis

beaten down from a paparazzi’d afterlife,

waving his soiled rhinestone cape like a soldier’s

white flag, when Bigfoot, D.B. Cooper, Hitler’s clone

unionize, agree to appear on a crop-circle set

for one ratings-rocking Oprah show…

when the world-weary alien refuses to endorse

a presidential hopeful, impregnates

a virgin who’s been frozen in an ice block

since the Kennedy administration…

we will know this is it, our kitsch Armageddon:

Oh bubble tea rosaries, oh bobble-head

saints, deliver my soul on a spork

to the icon with the biggest two-page spread.

(originally published in Pontoon: An Anthology of Washington State Poets)