Maureen Ann Connolly, 3/4/2013

Current Occupation: Poet and playwright.
Former Occupations: Reporter for newspapers and the Associated Press, business magazine editor, writing teacher, grant writer, and communication consultant.
Contact Information: Maureen Ann Connolly’s poetry has appeared in MARGIE, Off the Coast, Words and Images, Spillway, at poeticamagazine.com, and in the anthology “Lavanderia: A Mixed Load of Women, Wash, and Word.” In 2006, she won a Maine Literary Award (Individual Poem) and was a Judson Jerome Scholar at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop. Three of her poems were among 100 chosen by readers for The Poetry Ark Anthology (2011). Her two short plays “The Necrology Report” and “A Life-time Warranty” were produced in 2012 in Maine and Ohio. She’s author of the full-length play, “My Hands Remember,” produced by Wheelock Family Theatre, Boston. She lives in Maine and often puts her hands to work making jewelry.

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Thank You, Yolanda Williams

The pint-sized brown paper bag
holding take-home containers of
crispy rice remnants of Korean
bibimbap and a side of kimchi

is anything but a plain one. On the
bottom, stamped in red between
Made in the U.S.A.

                    and
Save This Bag for
Its Many Alternate Uses,

is the name of the bag’s maker,

Yolanda Williams. I imagine her

on the production line, hard-hatted,
with safety glasses, directing
a machine —robotic origami maker—
that cuts, folds and glues a single
blank sheet into a gem of a bag,

perfectly proportioned with
MOMA-worthy clean lines,
and an onion skin translucence
embodying the phrase “paper thin.”

I’m eating the leftovers at
my desk strewn with memos
of projects due and overdue.

I’ll throw away the empty
white, wire-handled boxes,
but will keep Yolanda’s work
to remind myself I must try
to make the useful artful.