Mara Beneway

Song Inside the Music Box

My friend teaches me how to be alone. She says I must
picture myself as another person. I practice keeping my own
company. Picture this: I’m a hot pink sky. I’m my grandmother’s
fingernails: hot pink. I’m magenta lingerie, cheap as beet juice,

hot as Barbie’s jeep. Now picture this: I’m the porcelain
ballerina who lives inside the music box. I’m perpetually dizzied
by time which chases me like a tail. See how time laps
up water with its cold tongue. Picture me diving into the deep end

of the music box. I’m swimming in a perennial song,
one that peonies back again each year. Picture my dad
teaching me how to garden. Notice his shovel, see how he digs
up daffodil bulbs, plants them again, root side down, each fall.

Picture my dad dragging his mother’s bloody
mattress out of her house. Picture him keeping the bullet
in the glove box of his Kia. Know my grandmother’s pink
casket is a music box unafraid of bullets. A still ballerina,

my grandmother, counts 5,6…5,6,7,8. She keeps time
underneath her tutu. Picture my grandmother holding
my dad as a baby. When I picture my dad, I see my own
face. When I say I’m alone, I tell a lie.

I picture myself as another person. She paints my fingernails
hot pink. She watches the clock swallow the bullet. She is full
of mothers. Every mother moves inside her like music
inside the music box. When she opens, a song bleeds out.

Mara Beneway is a writer, visual artist, and teacher from New York. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Bennington Review, Conduit, The Minnesota Review, Foglifter, and elsewhere. Her collection of linked flash fiction, Grandma June, won the Flume Press 2021 Chapbook competition. She is currently a graduate student studying Creative Writing at the University of South Florida and English Literature at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English.