Mary Biddinger
Parlor Games Are For The Weak
Calligraphy was for girls with nobody
to knife like a tree. Bowling
was for lives that never got lucky.
By the time I had my first
apartment, I kept a lipstick in every
room. There were exactly
three rooms. The garbage chute
backed up seven floors.
Old ladies of ghost vaudeville paid
for pints of gin with dimes
downstairs. Card games, violent
hairpieces, an illegal gray
monkey dressed as a rooster clown.
Certain days I swore they
boiled unpaired boots in the atrium.
Some tenants were never
seen, had Polish maids with elbows
like witch-handles, laundry
hampers and harp buckets. I failed
to comprehend a word.
When I moved out I left the dishes
dirty. Shoved my boxes
across lobby parquet like erasing
ice into a one-way map.
There was no room for degenerate
tea sets. I found a taxi
deep enough to fit my leg bones,
my ravening pincushions.
Risk Management Memo: Member Appreciation
The mushrooms were only college mushrooms.
My baton was homespun, ineffective.
Let’s say somebody builds a boat from scratch.
Someone else arrives home scratched
or otherwise altered. I took in an inch or seven
along the bust line. Let’s say five
and call it almost even. I wish I still had that
body, though this one knows more
important things: how many sighs in a night,
why never salt, tarantula math.
I was in love with a man because of his brick.
At this point I was made of lake.
Maybe I had stolen a sled, left my very best
cardigan on a westbound bus.
Perhaps I showed him both breasts, upside
the angriest half of his head.
He had a mind of politics, a crooked red
house with stiff chairs, shameful
blankets like a spinster. Let’s say we made
the idea of a fountain feel wet.
At a certain point I stopped going to work.
Then I even stopped calling in.
Farewell, 1979
It only took three blows
of the sledgehammer to spiderweb
what remained of our sliding door.
Nobody was inside.
Were we ever? The heavy cable
sweaters, somebody’s hair
(perhaps mine) mimicking
a Bavarian double-helix pastry.
Dissolution of our fingerprints
playing department store
window. My mannequin arm near
legendary. You were off
to captain the Ridgeview Temblors.
Victory was imminent.
Someone had coffined
your locker with rickrack and foil
but you were never cool, and I was
the sophomore who melted
every pig-leafed fern in the atrium.
Your theme song wasn’t
a theme song, rather the thud
a head makes hitting the underside
of bleachers. Your flask
more majestic than the water tower
where someone had painted
Lost not Forgotten in gigantic silver
mascara letters. Sometimes
you were the flagpole. I worshiped
at every last one of your
shrines, remembered my camera.
Even when they slapped
the old house down to its knees
and zip-tied its wrists,
somehow the gutters kept clinging.
This was all before magic
was uncovered to be an astronomical
phenomenon, the way a lip
becomes a red bird against glass.
Mary Biddinger is the author of the poetry collections Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007), Saint Monica (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), and A Sunny Place with Adequate Water (Black Lawrence Press, forthcoming 2014). She is also co-editor of The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (U Akron Press, 2011). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Bat City Review, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, Crab Orchard Review, Forklift, Ohio, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Quarterly West, and Redivider, among others. She teaches literature and poetry writing at The University of Akron, where she edits Barn Owl Review, the Akron Series in Poetry, and the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics. www.marybiddinger.com
Return to July 2013 Edition
Calligraphy was for girls with nobody
to knife like a tree. Bowling
was for lives that never got lucky.
By the time I had my first
apartment, I kept a lipstick in every
room. There were exactly
three rooms. The garbage chute
backed up seven floors.
Old ladies of ghost vaudeville paid
for pints of gin with dimes
downstairs. Card games, violent
hairpieces, an illegal gray
monkey dressed as a rooster clown.
Certain days I swore they
boiled unpaired boots in the atrium.
Some tenants were never
seen, had Polish maids with elbows
like witch-handles, laundry
hampers and harp buckets. I failed
to comprehend a word.
When I moved out I left the dishes
dirty. Shoved my boxes
across lobby parquet like erasing
ice into a one-way map.
There was no room for degenerate
tea sets. I found a taxi
deep enough to fit my leg bones,
my ravening pincushions.
Risk Management Memo: Member Appreciation
The mushrooms were only college mushrooms.
My baton was homespun, ineffective.
Let’s say somebody builds a boat from scratch.
Someone else arrives home scratched
or otherwise altered. I took in an inch or seven
along the bust line. Let’s say five
and call it almost even. I wish I still had that
body, though this one knows more
important things: how many sighs in a night,
why never salt, tarantula math.
I was in love with a man because of his brick.
At this point I was made of lake.
Maybe I had stolen a sled, left my very best
cardigan on a westbound bus.
Perhaps I showed him both breasts, upside
the angriest half of his head.
He had a mind of politics, a crooked red
house with stiff chairs, shameful
blankets like a spinster. Let’s say we made
the idea of a fountain feel wet.
At a certain point I stopped going to work.
Then I even stopped calling in.
Farewell, 1979
It only took three blows
of the sledgehammer to spiderweb
what remained of our sliding door.
Nobody was inside.
Were we ever? The heavy cable
sweaters, somebody’s hair
(perhaps mine) mimicking
a Bavarian double-helix pastry.
Dissolution of our fingerprints
playing department store
window. My mannequin arm near
legendary. You were off
to captain the Ridgeview Temblors.
Victory was imminent.
Someone had coffined
your locker with rickrack and foil
but you were never cool, and I was
the sophomore who melted
every pig-leafed fern in the atrium.
Your theme song wasn’t
a theme song, rather the thud
a head makes hitting the underside
of bleachers. Your flask
more majestic than the water tower
where someone had painted
Lost not Forgotten in gigantic silver
mascara letters. Sometimes
you were the flagpole. I worshiped
at every last one of your
shrines, remembered my camera.
Even when they slapped
the old house down to its knees
and zip-tied its wrists,
somehow the gutters kept clinging.
This was all before magic
was uncovered to be an astronomical
phenomenon, the way a lip
becomes a red bird against glass.
Mary Biddinger is the author of the poetry collections Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007), Saint Monica (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), and A Sunny Place with Adequate Water (Black Lawrence Press, forthcoming 2014). She is also co-editor of The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (U Akron Press, 2011). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Bat City Review, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, Crab Orchard Review, Forklift, Ohio, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Quarterly West, and Redivider, among others. She teaches literature and poetry writing at The University of Akron, where she edits Barn Owl Review, the Akron Series in Poetry, and the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics. www.marybiddinger.com
Return to July 2013 Edition