349 Things I Don’t Need to Worry About Right Now: The Ollie Impossible

Poetry
Written By Elizabeth Marie Young

The Ollie Impossible. The Fukushima Azuma Baseball Stadium.

The Death of the World’s Tallest Horse. Women-focused apparel

brands. Wire cutters. Veggie chips. Getting kicked out of boarding

school. Stink bombs. Voeltzkow’s Chameleons. Vibrapurr

Technology. Cultural genocide. Whether a woman’s skin can smell

like apricot blossoms. Whether Yoko Ono’s a witch. Which river to

drink from next – the River of Mania, the River of Hypnosis, or the

River of Dynamite. Whether Salvador Dali convinced Yoko Ono to

buy a blade of grass for $10,000. Salvador Dali’s mustache hairs.

Courage, efficiency, cleanliness, horsemanship. The lush green

hills of Bavaria.

Elizabeth Marie Young

Elizabeth Marie Young is a Boston-based poet and educator. She spent a decade as a professor of ancient Greek and Roman languages and literature and has published widely on the poetry and culture of ancient Rome. Her first book of poems, Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize, won the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books. She is also the author of Translation as Muse: Poetic Translation in Catullus’s Rome, a book about the ancient Roman understanding of lyric translation and literary creativity. She has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center and the Squire Foundation. Her poems have recently appeared in journals including The Chicago Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and Sugar House Review.

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