Friday Mar 29

Mary Biddinger’s most recent book is O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, 2012). 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.

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Death of a Protagonist
 
 
The book told the story of how to tell a story
down a well, because at least a well is deep
 
or good at concealing lost jewelry. I flattened
my protagonist like homemade squid ink
 
linguine. I took my protagonist for a ride on
the Pike’s Peak Cog Railway. It now runs
 
year round. As I child I ran year round, but
now I start wrapping myself in yarn by May.
 
The boss assigned me a feature, but to me
a feature was more a cinderblock thrown
 
from a balcony into the mall fountain.
In my town, the grandmothers washed
 
their girdles and silverware in the mall
fountain. My protagonist once contracted
 
a case of German Measles from drinking
unpasteurized goat milk sold by a street
 
vendor. His grandmother washed his feet
in cider and pounded arugula until fever
 
retreated. Once, after flatlining, my
protagonist was resurrected into the body
 
of an ornamental cabbage. I sat on that
globe all day until I ran out of eggs.
 
 
 
Sometimes You Have to Let a Sister Go
 
 
I huddled under the black plastic tarp
of your family, the backyard stacked with boards
 
that were once a shed. I named all
of my saints. My charming mannerisms failed
 
to charm, like a silver Idaho trinket
down the storm sewer in November. No way
 
to stop the spin. You said we would travel all
the way to Thailand. Unburied
 
handfuls of plastic soldiers you never forgot.
Some mornings you shook
 
like an imaginary seamstress, a tremble-fox.
Then I was a good sister.
 
Clean apron, endless stacks of bandages or
prayers without subtlety.
 
You noticed how tiny my feet were, finches
in green slippers. Sandpaper
 
but the fine kind. Not a haunted fraternity
house, wingless jet plane.
 
Evenings you worked on our family crest,
a thistle buried in deep hay.