when maggie smiles
by Meredith Benjamin
maggie’s smile is a poem
about a balloon floating over Sedona.
it makes you want to learn the names of birds
— not just toucans and herons,
but quotidian finches who live in the yard.
when maggie smiles,
the war is over
and neil armstrong lands on the moon.
when maggie smiles, it pierces you;
maggie makes and unmakes my wounds with her mouth.
her smile is an ocean,
the light from the birthday candles,
the reason you don’t want the world to end.
Meredith H. Benjamin is a second-year Political Science student at Grinnell College. She is originally from the east coast, but has found herself in Colorado, Arizona, Georgia, and Iowa in recent years. She loves volleyball, curry dishes, The Ezra Klein Show, and anything Taylor Swift. Her work has been published in Polyphony Lit and the Grinnell Underground Magazine, and is forthcoming in Agapanthus Collective and the Grinnell Review.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “when maggie smiles”? “when maggie smiles” is a product of infatuation and distance. It is about a beautiful woman at whom I used to gaze and hear fully-formed lines of poetry suddenly crash into my head. I wrote these phrases down as they came, but when I actually tried stringing them together as a poem, I couldn’t get it right. I set the poem aside. Half a year later, I tried rewriting “when maggie smiles” and to my surprise, found success! No longer obsessed with capturing a feeling in its exactitude, I was able to focus instead on the process of writing. The experience highlighted the creative partnership between inspiration and its unsung sidekick: distance, without which, I suspect this piece would remain unfinished to this day.
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Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
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Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2023. Submit here.
Upcoming
09/09 • Rae Gourmand
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09/23 • TBD
09/30 • TBD