7th Annual Juried Reading
First Place Poet
Mary Biddinger

Mary Biddinger received an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University in 1998. Her work has recently appeared in Indiana Review, Ploughshares, Rhino, Whiskey Island Magazine, and Wisconsin Review, and is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review and ACM. She is currently working on her first collection of poems.

Coyote

You called me hellcat
like I was nothing
but trouble.

You said I could melt
bricks if I wanted.
I chose you over
all other disturbances.

How gently you shaved
my leg when I let you.
I would boil water
all day without knowing.

You taught me to make
a meal out of snow.
The one-two, one two
of my upstairs neighbors,

sand in your pockets.
And I have forgotten
what went between
and everything after.

But to nip your wrist
again on the rooftop
of St. Aloysius.
For this I would trade

my coat in winter.
Knot my hair and hang
until the wind took me.
All of this was fiction.

The sum of our bodies
is always uncertain,
and the timber wolf
pacing your parking lot

vanished every morning
before I woke. We are
resting comfortably now:
you flushed in a room

of hands, and I empty
with my back to plaster.
So long to the crickets
that crouched in each

motel room corner.
Goodbye to the arm
I bit off, left in your bed.

- Mary Biddinger


(C) 2001 The Poetry Center of Chicago
All Rights Revert Back to the Author Upon Publication.
No Portion of this poem may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author.