Poem Poem by Maggie O'Sullivan

to defend this
poem from its own attack , I'll
say that both the flush left
and irregular right margins constantly loom
as significant events, often interrupting what
I thought I was about to
write and making me write something
else entirely. Even though I'm going
back and rewriting, the problem still
reappears every six words. So this,
and every poem, is a marginal
work in a quite literal sense.
Prose poems are another matter: but
since they identify themselves as poems
through style and publication context, they
become a marginal subset of poetry,
in other words, doubly marginal.. . .