Mary Biddinger


Everyone Believes a Nightmare Only Lasts as Long as the Night


I startled awake and stepped outside, dragging my nightmare like a sled. Our neighborhood’s corner granny was already on her stoop with a radio the size of an envelope, potato peeler in hand. My cheeks smacked by sleep, sloppy remnants of braids in my hair, cheap rayon pajamas in princess pattern. The radio broadcasted a strings concert into the alley, followed by several minutes of applause. Corner granny pointed at a stone bench for me to sit. Then the doorway ate her the way a cartoon cat closes its mouth around a bird. Morning noises curled through the block. In the front room window, corner granny’s mutts gazed out like twin cloistered nuns, drapes around pointy faces. Three workers crossed the alley with Marlboros and metal thermoses the shape of bombs. Corner granny returned with a paper plate of fried bologna, peppers so sour they made my eyebrows twitch, sliced bread soft as a motel coverlet. She pulled a comb from her apron pocket. It resembled an animal bone carved into a set of dull teeth. I drew my nightmare for her in the dirt: cliffs, snowbanks, sky a bottomless pond.


Everyone Has a Story About the Corner Bar


Some people called the unnamed corner bar Cooley’s, but there was never a Cooley on the lease. My uncle claimed to see a name etched in worn mosaic tile of the doorway, but that turned out to be the silhouette of a cartoon mink. One afternoon a man sat down at the bar and asked for a wine glass filled with cashews. He pulled out a copy of a Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, folded it in half, then began to pick his teeth. Some local toughs took note. It was 1971, the north side filled with longhaired punks in white t-shirts riding banana seat bikes, tagging the backs of sheds, tossing bricks at passing cars. Our neighborhood corner granny, who was not a granny at the time, walked in the bar’s back door carrying trays of pierogi and fried onions. The man asked for a pen, jotted a few words on a napkin, then handed the pen back to the bartender. A neighbor was hosting a baby shower at the bar, complete with party games and balloons that bobbed like bright drunks. One partygoer queued Patsy Cline on the jukebox. A couple of women started to sway, and then the tornado siren wailed. At first everyone looked at the toughs, as if they could trigger an alarm if not a storm. Then the barback stepped outside to a sky green like a punched arm. A few people sprinted home to their basements. Punks ran out the door to feel the updraft in their greasy hair. The man unfolded his map and asked about the timing of the next bus, shook a few cashews into his hand. Everyone else shuttled down rickety wooden stairs to Cooley’s cellar, crouched between enormous pickle jars and kegs that loomed like catacombs. Nobody ever saw that man at Cooley’s again. Upstairs, Patsy Cline kept singing like nothing whatsoever was wrong.

 

Mary Biddinger’s latest books are Partial Genius: Prose Poems and Department of Elegy, both with Black Lawrence Press. Her poems have recently appeared in Diode, Pithead Chapel, and A Dozen Nothing, and flash fiction has appeared in Always Crashing, Gone Lawn, DIAGRAM, and Southern Indiana Review. Her work has been featured on Poetry Daily and The Slowdown. She edits the Akron Series in Poetry for the University of Akron Press, and teach creative writing at the University of Akron and NEOMFA program.

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