Mary Biddinger
Wrong Things Done So Right
The men in my town made their own wood
out of gunpowder. Bones were the wood.
I was the bone they most wanted to string.
Disobedience was expected, so we excelled
at being the wood. Mine Brazilian cherry,
or a fine replica. Someone watched a show
about unnatural habitats. The bone did not
watch anyone for long. A hawk descended
upon a piece of wood in the river, thinking
it was a muskrat, or somebody’s thigh bone.
I knew it was only an old buckshot pheasant
pretending to be an ancient book in vellum.
The television blurred into a commercial.
A man next door hacked something in two.
What it was didn’t matter. We were all still
bone, and waiting for the right sort of rope.
Elegy with Flickering Lights
Something like arrested for solicitation,
like the underbelly of a boat that nobody saw
for what it was. We pretended an escape hatch.
Her yard had so many chickens it was ridiculous
and so were we. Somehow the marbles became
a commodity worth more than glass. We wore
old-fashioned sleeves and dirty knee socks.
She drew all over her mattress with red marker.
In ten years we’d both have the right touch
for something. It was inevitable. Our dresses
would haunt one man’s closet, and then another.
I was always the one mouthing off, getting into
whatever car opened its door. Windows issuing
cologne that smelled like cherry disinfectant.
Halfway through the night we’d swap wigs
and how that would shake everything up.
Once we watched a car fly off the overpass
and crash onto a highway. All I remember was
how the horn blared all the way down. Lights
in the gas station flickered for the shortest
second on record. Then the cash register rang.
The door closed, and I never saw her again.
--
Mary Biddinger is the author of three collections of poetry: Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007), the chapbook Saint Monica (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), and O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), and co-editor of one volume of criticism: The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (U Akron Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Devil’s Lake, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, and Puerto del Sol. She teaches literature and creative writing at The University of Akron/NEOMFA, and edits Barn Owl Review, the Akron Series in Poetry, and the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics.