Ghostwriter

The hawk was clearly in distress—I knew this because I was, too.
Somehow traffic seemed to increase or get faster, mostly pickups.
To this day I still worry I haven’t locked my car, shut the burner.
Harbored a dream of ghostwriting novels about animals, but not
that hawk and not that day, my hair was dirty and in a catastrophic
up-do. I was wearing a sweater from 1996 and it was not 1996 or
even close. How I envied people who did their lives correctly, not
like a sitcom with a thousand loose threads: fallings-down, trains
dramatically entered and departed, actual guns, furious scrubbing
of upholstered furniture. I’d only had a few memorable junctures
that were clearly critical. I thought of this as I wrapped my hands
in a sack left under a park bench. Conventional education offers
zero insights. Perhaps it would feel cleaner to live up in the trees.

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Mary Biddinger’s poetry collection Department of Elegy will be published by Black Lawrence Press in early 2022. Her poems and flash fiction have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Bennington Review, DIAGRAM, On the Seawall, The Laurel Review, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. She teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Akron and NEOMFA program, and serves as poetry editor for the University of Akron Press. Read more about her work at https://marybiddinger.com/.