Mary biddinger

PERSONAL STATEMENT

After so much time working in a bandage factory
you become a bandage yourself, much like the woods

on their creep closer to abandoned row houses
that sink like grommets into the leather of the block.

Any one person alone is wholly uninteresting, but
fan that punitive gray wool skirt out against a river

and it will be chain mail to the elements. Perhaps you
lose things like your pens, or feeling in fingertips,

but are in no way a loser or lost unless you want to be.
If your days are spent testing the gauze, you might

hope to go home and find a loose beam or triggered
dove in the eaves. Occasionally your own body

is the factory, and the bandages are what you speak
into a series of plastic buckets or letterhead envelopes

which are kept in a locked cabinet much like your own
chest, flecked with disregarded memos or old tape.

HEAVEN AND ITS ATMOSPHERE

I think of this weather as “our weather”
and the shudder of blood down my lip

as our weather, and when bulldozers
rip the faces off houses and pitch birds

into the clouds it’s into our atmosphere,
and the bathtub I pretend-drown in is our

mock shallows, like when we projected
a movie onto my thighs, or when you ran

to the store in my jeans for pearl onions,
and that was our bodega where I drew 

one twenty dollar bill from the ATM or
dropped a handful of change from our

envelope, and I think of countless bus
commutes with a lake over my shoulder

and my purse wedged between our hips,
how as an early adopter of our madness

I was ready for you to undertake multiple
sketches of my night feet in your notebook 

which looked like one of our sandwiches
from back when we worked in separate

kitchens across state lines, where weather
was just another damp apron in the grass. 

BELL IN A BOX

I was ready like a little claw,
ashamed at how much I used to like
mail. I was a bell in a box, a multi-
purpose tool too difficult to use so
people gave up on me. A chipped
lipstick stalk, bubblegum ice cream
cone toppled onto the tile floor.
I used to be like a solitary fawn in
juvenile pajamas, but now only
a sauce that turned out monstrously
and ended up tossed into alley weeds.
It was like the time I attempted to sew
a dress from some curtains but made
an amateur bear trap on accident.
I was three t-shirts, each one uglier
than the last. My hands smelled like
pastries, but tasted of the insides
of gloves and the backs of ears.

MARY BIDDINGER IS THE AUTHOR OF FIVE FULL-LENGTH POETRY COLLECTIONS, INCLUDING SMALL ENTERPRISE AND THE CZAR. HER SIXTH BOOK, PARTIAL GENIUS, WILL BE PUBLISHED BY BLACK LAWRENCE PRESS IN AUGUST 2019. SHE TEACHES LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AKRON AND NEOMFA PROGRAM, AND EDITS THE AKRON SERIES IN POETRY FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF AKRON PRESS. BIDDINGER HAS BEEN THE RECIPIENT OF THREE INDIVIDUAL EXCELLENCE AWARDS IN POETRY FROM THE OHIO ARTS COUNCIL, AND RECEIVED A NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS FELLOWSHIP IN 2015. FIND HER ONLINE AT MARYBIDDINGER.COM AND @MARYBID ON TWITTER.