Three Poems

Wisconsin Was Our California

Because your days were tethered
to oversized moths, or bleeding aluminum
awnings, we could only go so far

as the train would take us. Those summers
nothing but radio and damp sheers
picketing the front window, imaginary

nuns I used to fold out of tissues.
At first I thought your body was dirty,
like cinema velvet. You had an alligator

spine in the foyer. I had to slide along
the floor to not wake your mother. Christ
himself was stationed on a plate

in the living room, painted by distant
grandfathers who earned the chin you split.
I counted the constellation of pinholes

surrounding your knee. You thought
they were charming, but you also loved
to press your cheek into the wing

of a moth, or its twin that existed inside
my body. I was a spill of trashy pearls,
not even close to fully formed.

Over/Under

Your name was a sound that I made
when pitching the last box onto a wagon bed

and readying to go west. The apple
was so proud of its seam, in a way that spoke

of afternoons in a vault populated by wet
handkerchiefs and rotten snow,

holes, Toronto on the cusp of July,
the invention of lightning like we made it all

up. Everything looked and felt and eventually
went away mad. The fish may

have been fists, or lights. Truly I
was just another mandible to you, set of legs,

a lighter somebody dropped
backstage and later felt in the swift crevices

where back meets back meets back. Nothing
good ever happens now. I walk

with an eye over my shoulder. Sinister quick
marts. Sidewalk cafes patrons

sidle through. We spent so many
hours inventing a way to conflate ourselves

permanently, like a room packed with post-
structuralists and limited

supplies of olives. In your native language
there was nothing to rhyme

with a phrase meaning we
are meant to be together but flown apart.

Mild to Moderate Savagery

Even the fire was on fire and covered
with fringe. I threw a handful of beads

into a lake. Not hand-carved ones, but
factory beads, the kind ladies threaded

in their chignons. The least senile man
present at late Mass would batter them

with a missalette, thinking sparks or
unusually quiet shelling. Everything

outside the church was orange-leaved.
There wasn’t the slightest sandal strap

or alligator clip, no altar boy belching
the alphabet into a payphone. Every

ledge had one cat and one quail, just
not at the same time. I wore a chronic

frill. My cousin was lowering herself
into a cauldron. My honey rack fell

off the wall in a sort of impromptu
fury. The wolves found a way into

an abandoned 1979 station wagon
and you know the rest of the story.

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Mary Biddinger’s most recent poetry collection is O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, 2013). She is also co-editor of The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (U Akron Press, 2011). Her poems have recently appeared in Crazyhorse, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, and Sou’wester, among others. She teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Akron, where she edits the Akron Series in Poetry and Barn Owl Review.