Featured Poet: Mary Biddinger

Mary Biddinger spent half of her life in Chicago and environs before defecting to the Cuyahoga Valley, where she is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Akron and NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a variety of journals including ACM, American Literary Review, Crazyhorse, Harpur Palate, The Iowa Review, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, and Salt Hill, and her first book, Prairie Fever, is forthcoming from Steel Toe Books (Spring 2007). She is an Associate Editor of the literary magazine RHINO. Her favorite tree is the Sugar Maple. She is currently at work on a second book of poetry.

THE TWINS

I see it: no more dusk

to your days. Months ago we

stood on a porch loaded with

empty terracotta pots.

Matchbooks, snowbound

floribunda, empty rice sacks.

It occurs to me that everything

is still there without us,

creaking with temperature

swings and rainstorms. Smoke

from the three women next door,

locked out and waiting.

There were landscapes

in acrylic. Chimes from clocks

we couldn’t find. Plum tomatoes

in quart baskets. I watched

them shiver into pools

on the countertop, as if you

had rolled them in your hands

for hours. Light was gold

and inching closer, taxis

banked cheek to cheek on

the highway below. Evenings

like this I wanted kept

on ice or tucked beneath

a layer of silk. I didn’t have silk, 

only wool and nylon. There was

nothing left of the night,

only train cars and breath.

They could dust me for prints

and find just fingertip salt and rust.

You were a halo of consonants

in the dull ebb of my pulse. 

I could have hung my jacket up.

You could have told me how

they found us and took us

to our opposite corners, separate

lawns, rooms where we both slept on

twin beds, star quilts, lost in the scent

of cotton batting and blackjack gum.

ROYAL BLUE

We were two strands of thread 

snagged on a wooden barn door.

You were odd granite shrapnel

in my safety goggles. One wet

sheep standing on the driveway.

A bad stomachache after apples

and capers. If I painted the wall

ecru, you walked into it bloody

handed. Those days were less

Flemish and more Portuguese,

at least in the beginning. What

Old Master would’ve measured

from my elbow to the toaster?

If oxen crowded the interstate

we were in no way responsible

or even aware. I was not your

wife, not even close. Alpacas

always left me shivering like

a tuberculosis stick, or elevator

skipping a floor. A cartoon man

naked in a barrel can never be

unrolled. I ironed handkerchiefs

for quick cash. I let them weld

me behind some mesh. It’s mean

the way we flush right out, like

milk, and then we begin all over.

Once, we both lived underwater.

MILFOIL & AFTERTHOUGHT

There were four rooms. There were eight. You were in corners and under
furniture, near my knees, reflections of your back in stainless steel.
Suspenders, Florsheims and avocado linen. There was limestone halfway
up, and I knew I’d crash into it if I could move fast. You thought it
was a cold place. The light bulbs?  It was all like helium to me at
that point. I said someone should be taking pictures, the way we were
sprawled on the hardwood or propped up on rattan sofas. One time in the
airport we were both small and spun together in a leather chair chained
to the ceiling. You touched my leg.  Nobody was taking pictures, but
that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, or that we weren’t in Frankenmuth
five years later, at connecting tables but kept separate. A shed behind
the school, or that storm sewer at the dunes, past the grasses, left of
concession, the sand that felt like clay, like slip, how blond you had
become, I hardly recognized.  If you were here in this room you’d
remind me of the guitar, the train platform, the silver Cutlass
containing me and continuing on past it all. You said we’d go back. I
was always a good runner.  You said: the smoothest skin ever.  We’d
seen the skyline from two dozen taxis, our own legs on the bridge, from
the grass, from the grass again, in the grass on my front lawn, lit by
the cheap plastic solar lamps, from deep past the buoys of Lake
Michigan and into the waterways connecting.  We knew where we had come
from, had that in common.  In college I looked out the laundry room
window and saw you between leaves, in a corduroy jacket.  We’re here,
you said. There were blue sheets I used instead of curtains.  Later I’d
be in a hundred rooms with tin ceilings and slim wine glasses, or
rectangular tables and cinderblocks and papers.  In the subway window
I’d look nothing but tired.  I would try everything from milk to cactus
in hope of turning you to milk and cactus and dark rafters and back
again, so when I closed my eyes it was heat and every other color we
described.  The nights kept us like ants under plastic.  I kept you in
places that were cool and uncovered.  You touched my face like it was
years ago and just starting. I was busy fending off letters and
drinking green tea and lying in a cool bath.  By noon, everything was
back where it had been. We’re here and we’re living, you said. 

FOXGLOVES AT 3 PM

Ballooned on the back porch

like a bullfrog in springtime.

All full of it. The whole world

going down on its neighbor

and then sliding up bus steps

fragrant with Dial, snapping

wintergreen gum. Sunglasses,

duffel bag, nobody knows

how damp your body is.

Rooms the buttercup gold

they use for schools, seen

on desks, hushed in cotton.

What’s not a hustle? No

need for silk when you’ve 

got grease. At the opening 

reception, nobody checked

the broom closet for nudes.

There were hours pressing 

faces under the paintings,

a glass of whole milk split

between us before stained

glass grottoes. Grandparents

dressed you in lederhosen

every autumn. I was lost

as a child and felt my way

into a neighboring borough.

Why were we the only two

left at the end of the song?

It sounded like shaking, coal

dust, bells, a sitar and tabla

set loose in the wet mines.

We used to meet at the back

table, like we were corporate.

You would help me with my

buttons. I walked that room

and stepped through the blinds

into midday traffic, our haze 

a secret. Each dress I snagged

on the same broken hinges.

RED SEA

An afternoon across from you

in copper light. Smuggling

a quart of milk on the city bus

to drink between potholes.

We stood at the edge of a lot

rumbling with maple leaves.

Lie down in it. Lay it down.

An hour later under sixty watt

bulbs, albacore in pepper oil.

Where did I go when your

arm slid across my shoulder?

Even my palms turned cold.

Even gabardine went sharp.

You told a story of cloves sewn

into canvas pillows. A wife

who loved blanched leeks.

A childhood of Appaloosas

that resisted training, or girls

in distant cities wearing silk.

I remembered a chandelier

I once dissected in the basement

without permission. Your face

startled in the stairway. Blood

rides water underground

like another body. Waiting on

a bar stool in Waukegan, knowing

you are in Ashtabula, no phone.

The sound of dancing drifts through.

© 2007 Mary Biddinger