Mary Biddinger

ANTIQUE FILAMENT

This is the year that I stop answering. Grab the wrong knife
and follow through with it. Tear the doorknob

off the door. I walked into my deepest fear which loomed
like a gown on a hook. Held several prescribed

words at the ready: something about a holiday, quick joke
on swan taxidermy, a pair of Victorian facts.

This is the year I tell everyone how I like wet hinges, trick
bathroom locks you can leave unlocked

if you want company. I said I was waiting for you to come.
The lighting was unrealistically flattering. 

Have you ever watched a real clock grind its time, I asked,
not waiting for a reply, recalling a stunned

finch in its stoned spiral out of the rotting crabapple tree.
Maybe we returned to the party like vendors

hovering around a quota. The year already afire, a bucket
of receipts for items that no longer existed  

because we banished them. And then a watery anecdote
about paintings atop other paintings, rude

if the artist is within earshot, objectionable when ripped
stockings are still visible beneath a revised

landscape. Somebody put us here and then covered us,
watched as we unbuttoned and stepped out.

MARY BIDDINGER is the author of multiple books of poetry, most recently Partial Genius (Black Lawrence Press). Recent poems appear in The Adroit Journal, Court Green, Poetry, and Southern Indiana Review. She lives, writes, teaches, edits, and tends cats in Akron, Ohio.