Mary Jo Bang: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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A Film in Which I Play Everyone

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In an outdated Hollywood magazine, I found a photo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.

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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, and Purgatorio. Paradiso is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise by Matthias Göritz, and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in November 2024. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. [Author photo by Carly Ann Faye]

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Dorothea Tanning, Self-Portrait, 1944, oil on canvas. [This is the cover image for Mary Jo Bang’s book, A Film in Which I Play Everyone.]