Four Poems by Mary Kane
/FIEND
Mary Kane
You’re walking around not doing much of anything when you notice there’s a woman inside of you, her arms in your arms, her legs in your legs, her torso in your torso, her head in your head.
The woman inside of you is large.
She’s a large woman, a woman much larger than you. How is that possible. It isn’t possible and yet it is so.
~ ~ ~ ~
The woman inside you has wide shoulders, hands like an old-fashioned baseball glove, the fingers flat and thick.
You’ve a large woman inside you and aren’t sure what to do so you decide to boil an egg.
You’re boiling an egg looking out the window at a pot of pink geraniums and the large woman inside of you begins to grow even larger.
~ ~ ~
The woman inside you, large already, is growing larger and you hear an internal creaking.
You hear a creaking (is it your bones being crushed) and think the word fiend.
~ ~ ~ ~
A fiend is sometimes an evil spirit. A fiend is also one who excels at something.
You are boiling an egg and you’ve a very large woman inside you who continues to grow. She wears a sunhat.
What does it feel like to have a head inside your head when the head inside your head wears a sunhat.
~ ~ ~
The woman inside you, though cumbersome, doesn’t strike you as evil. Does she excel at some activity. Do you.
Look. She’s just sitting down at a typewriter. The woman inside you is just this minute about to begin writing her autobiography.
STARTING OUT
Mary Kane
The woman inside you is this very minute beginning her autobiography with the word fiddledeedee.
You presume, correctly or possibly incorrectly, that the matter of her narrative is all nonsense to her.
But wait, the word fiddledeedee is in quotation marks.
Does the woman inside of you’s use of punctuation suggest that she’s begun with a bit of dialogue.
Might fiddledeedee be her response to a statement by someone who presumes to dictate to her right ways of living.
BANJO AND FIDDLE
Mary Kane
Now the woman inside you fits inside you because she has dehydrated herself.
She’s dehydrated herself like one of those apples made to look like a shrunken head.
She imagines beginning her life over as a hillbilly.
The woman inside you gets a new hat, a hillbilly hat. She starts to smoke a corncob pipe and pluck a banjo.
THE WORK DOESN’T END
Mary Kane
It turns out, not surprisingly really, that after a brief time, call it a 3-page chapter in life, you grow accustomed to being an accommodation.
You begin to think of your scalp as a roof, your hair as shingles.
You enjoy the corridors and rooms inside of you.
When you go about your day, when you rise, for instance, from a chair, you feel the woman inside you, who hasn’t risen with you, knock against someplace inside you.
Depending on the day, she feels like a five-pound weight or a rolled up carpet inside you.
You find yourself interested in how her size varies from day to day.
Just yesterday she was so small she could fit quite comfortably inside your kidney.
Not that she resided in your kidney for the day, but she could have.
You can’t exactly see what she’s doing in there, but there are times when you simply know, the knowing comes in flashes.
She is at her desk, continuing her autobiography.
Mary Kane's poems have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, on Poetry Daily and other journals. An award-winning poet, she is author of two chapbooks and one full-length collection, Door (One Bird Book, 2015).
