Mary Biddinger
A convent childhood can be peaceful, my godmother waxed, the same way an empty field can be a bed, a bowl of snow a meal. Beauty was an acre of frozen leaves. Desire lived under the lid of a simmering pot, enough to feed a fleet. Some girls would trade their day’s daub of honey for a song that spread like syrup through a cold morning room. Everyone illuminated manuscripts by hand: adding cascades of tears to the statues, second tails for the lions. Sister Mary Rita frowned and cast those pages into the fire. Once my godmother swooned over a bead on the sidewalk. It turned out to be an odd nub of frozen blood, somehow more resplendent than a gem. The convent school employed zero men—even the coal was shoveled by a nun. My godmother and her friends grew gorgeous beneath their capes, completely out of view. I listened to this story from my sleeping bag on the living room floor, hair in tattered rag curlers. Chicago, 1983, ambient bells of Saint Ben’s the closest I got to church unless my godmother wrote me into her plans. Most of her tales from the old country involved an explosion or curse: fire-vomiting haystack, a family with generations of leaky right eyes. Except when she was telling me about the convent school, which lived in her memory like a nest of yarn. We walked to the greasy spoon for breakfast, my house devoid of bread and eggs, mother working late or dating someone from work, partying through the night. My godmother ordered only black coffee, preserving her stomach for the eucharist. The hostess complimented her chic modest snood, her coiled coif (the convent girls taught each other this twist, then promptly went to confession to atone). I devoured a pancake that looked like the full moon.
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Mary Biddinger’s most recent book is the novella-in-flash The Girl with the Black Lipstick (Black Lawrence Press, 2025). She teaches poetry and fiction writing at the University of Akron and in the NEOMFA program and serves as poetry editor for the University of Akron Press. Her current project is a new book of prose poems, Latchkey, which explores feral 1980s Chicago childhood and its reverberations later in life.