Mary Jo Bang
This poem is from The Museum of Mary, a book-length series of ekphrastic poems that feature, in one way or another, a woman named Mary. My approach was: find a painting, choose a Mary (or, choose a Mary, find a painting), and allow the collision between the two to serve as a slant mirror that ideally reflects both the speaker and the reader, which is what I believe the lyric has always strived do. In this poem, I wanted to gesture to Sappho’s Fragment 16, the opening stanza of what is known as “The Anactoria Poem”—“Some say an army on horseback, some say on foot, some say a fleet of ships, but I say whatever you desire is the most beautiful sight on this dark earth.” In the first version, an unnamed speaker and a woman named Eve are reading Sappho; because Eve seemed like a mere stick figure, the Sappho paraphrase felt inconsequential. The sleeping/dying Virgin Mary in the first painting also created a problem since sleep and death are antithetical to desire (except of course for the French orgasmic petite mort). So, I found a different painting, named the speaker Mary Jo and made Sappho the surrogate lover, which allowed Sappho to speak and prompted me to draw on my own acquired knowledge and emotional intelligence to complicate the narrative.
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The poem “Mary Jo and Sappho” first appeared in The Gay & Lesbian Review, January-February 2025
< draft >
Eve and I
We wandered through the cards:
When we came to the sailor we said,
“We like you, but we like each other
a bit better.” We were otherwise
very well-behaved. And don’t pretend
that you don’t know about tempting
and blaming and spray-painted snakes
so pretty that everyone wants anything
on offer. That’s her, to the left of me,
depending on one’s perspective—
her face in her hands, a coat she took
from a hook on the door. I called her
my alter. We kissed when we said
goodnight. We read Sappho who says,
not a lot of this, not a lot of that,
but whatever you desire, that’s beauty.
Out my window, the hands of the well-
rounded clock never stop. They say
pure love can carry you away.
Which to me is a lot like sleeping.
Dormition of the Virgin, Hans Holbein the Elder, 1491–1492
< final version >
MARY JO AND SAPPHO
Her face is facing the sea, her shoulders
are covered in a coat she took from a hook
on the door before we walked out
of the dim-lit room where I’d kissed her
and called her my altar.
She said: “Some say this, some say that,
but I say—whatever you desire,
that is beauty.” She ofc said more than that
but that’s what I most remember.
When we made our way along the path
at the top of the precipice and saw the boys
waving up to us, we called down,
saying they should stay where they were,
that we liked one another better.
We were other but otherwise well-behaved—
tempting fate and painting the dawn
red with ultra-highlights. “So pretty,”
Aphrodite said. After that, everyone
wanted one. I loved her so. She loved me
only briefly before running off with the ghost
of a goddess who’d lied when she said
she loved her. She preferred that once-was
to me, a mortal who never lied
but who was flawed in every other respect.
This account of the action, recounted
ad infinitum, refreshes the narrator so that
the story can maintain itself until the dead
finally understand the damage they’ve done.
Female Companions of Sappho, Antoine-Christian Zacharie, called Tony Zac,
ca. 1868