Book of Mild Regrets
by Mary Biddinger
Here I am, fretting over whether it鈥檚 okay
to take a second Zyrtec, when fifteen years ago
I downed a pill nicknamed El Capitan while
a woman I just met shaved my head with a knife.
It was clear I would never become a Fly Girl
because the decade was off, but my greatest hits
still snapped on like a trustworthy lantern.
Today I apply several coatings of organic spray
proven to further cleanse small batch basil
I vetted at Whole Foods, when almost yesterday
my amateur chainmail had me swallowing
half a marsh in one night, my friend disappeared
past the gorge, a man with sufficient facial
metal to be characterized as a homemade weapon.
Something spiked that was spiked, noise
eating itself beneath flat rocks. And why is it now
I can鈥檛 settle on a single laundry detergent
but keep replacing what I have with what seems
milder, like the time I cried for sixteen hours
over a photograph of a Chincoteague pony, lodged
between the fence and the hillside, fetlocks
hammered by street mud. When I take my clothes
off and iron them better, when I recycle fifty
sheets of paper for one italic comma, maybe I pay
some forgotten bar tab. Like the time I fell
straight through a mirror imported from Galway.
I was standing in the apple aisle. Ambrosia, Braeburn. Even before the pandemic I preferred shopping right when the store opened. This day I was in my neighborhood Whole Foods. Grocery list on a sticky note on the back of my phone. It wasn鈥檛 cold outside. I didn鈥檛 have a jacket. I was the sole customer standing in the apple aisle while workers stocked things and then oh lord, like a gale peeled back the roof of the store, every speaker lit up crashing the opening notes of 鈥淛ane Says.鈥� Something went through my body like I was being hotwired. Is it possible to envy a past self for its brave stupidity? This is a poem attempting to answer that question.
latest poetry collection is Partial Genius (Black Lawrence Press,聽2019). Poems have recently appeared in Court Green, POETRY, Tupelo Quarterly,听补苍诲 Waxwing, among others. She is a professor of English at the University of聽Akron, and edits the Akron Series in Poetry. Biddinger has received awards or聽fellowships from the Cleveland Arts Prize, Ohio Arts Council, and NEA.