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By Mary Jo Bang
In scene two, silence is a sleeve, I’m an arm in it.
In an outdated Hollywood magazine, I found a photo
of someone wearing my hair. How can that be?
Now I can’t stop thinking about the synaptic sparks
over which no one has any control. Or, they have some
control but not enough to count on in a crisis.
I’m making sense all the time of all the senseless endings.
A day is as long as the time it takes
for the mind to consider life and death countless times.
Which must make a day plus a night a highway
we’re only vaguely aware of since we’re busy
sitting in a chair or lying on a bed
with a floral-print bedspread or walking to the store
past someone with a dog on a leash and a phone
in their hand, into which they seem to be saying,
“That is not what I meant blah, blah, blah”
to an absent ear. Home, you unpack the items
you bought, crease the bags flat, stack them out of sight.
All without saying a word. This is a non-speaking part.
You’re an extra. That day you were filmed
on the steps walking into the school dance,
the costume you wore was pure you.
The set for the scene where everyone disappears
was painted Parisian sky-blue. The air burned
like a curtain on fire. The fire kept going out,
then being relit, a trick candle on a cake made of clouds.
Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz, and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
The Conversation Room is located on the campus of St. John’s College, on the first floor of Mellon Hall, across from the Mitchell Art Museum. The reading series is made possible by the Rowsome family memorializing St. John’s Tutor Nancy Buchanauer, the Maryland State Arts Council, St. John’s College, Annapolis Home Magazine, and Friends of Poets in the Conversation Room.
Poem by Mary Jo Bang from A Film in Which I Play Everyone: Poems. Copyright © 2023 by Mary Jo Bang. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press.
© Annapolis Home Magazine
Vol. 16, No. 4 2025