LEAVING BIDDLE CITY 

Outside the Quality Dairy, pink-haired humans in their twenties sip on gallons of apple cider vinegar. This is where the sky is gray and the streets are gray and the message inside us to escape the cold remains unread. I want to discard this paczki. I want to crack open the sky into a frying pan and eat it with bacon for lunch. Once I saw a barn on fire in an empty field, filling the gray sky with more gray, smoke and ash, but also orange—the blaze and heat stinging my cheeks and lungs. No animal was harmed. The horses with their worn-out hooves galloped across the state of Michigan to Canada, gorging on cherries, chomping on boxes of Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix. Their need to escape belting the high notes from their chests. Biddle City, I'll call you my brief and little home, but the crab apples soured on my lover's lawn and I was tired of the colorless winters, the only-occasional fire that made me feel like I was somewhere, someone.

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INVISIBLE BIDDLE CITY

                    after Italo Calvino

Biddle City is a dreamed-of thing, an abstract space, a theory. In other words, its branches are layered with snow. In other words, I don't know if I am remembering or imagining. During melting seasons, I see a glimmer of Biddle City reflected in the metallic domes of the fire hydrants that guard each street. Sometimes when I am nowhere near, I see Biddle City's colors in the light and shadows of a picture I keep in my wallet. When I am walking through another city, I occasionally hear the voice of a woman shouting syllables through a window, and I wonder when I can return to Biddle City's turret-shaped gazebo, its beautiful winter men bathing on front porches with beards, buckets, frozen hoses, central Michigan dialects, good-healthy teeth. If I saw them, I would say: Tell me about your memory town. Tell me its features. Tell me about the rectangular block of concrete where the old women sit.  

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THE BIDDLE CITY MUSICAL

I tried out for the 8th grade musical. I did a monologue from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I didn't make it. I don't think I was untalented; after all, I did a monologue from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I think they couldn't see me. I don't think I was untalented; it's just that my invisibility sometimes flares up. I think they couldn't see me. They only saw the table, the choir chairs. It's just that my invisibility sometimes flares up. When I least expect it to. They only saw the table, the choir chairs. I think this is called bad stage presence. When I least expect it to, someone says something funny about it. I think this is called bad stage presence. I tried out for the 8th grade musical. Someone says something funny about it. I didn't make it.

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These poems are a part of a series focused on a misremembered, mythologized version of my hometown, Lansing, Michigan. Because when I think of Lansing, I think of the landscape as being very flat, this series is made up of prose poems, plus some formal poems that are flattened into prose. For example, "Biddle City Musical" is a prose pantoum. Find two more of my Biddle City prose pantoums in [The Puritan].