Mary Ann Dimand

Mary Ann Dimand was born in Southern Illinois where Union North met Confederate South, and her work is shaped by kinships and conflicts: economics and theology, farming and feminism and history. Dimand holds an MA in Economics from Carleton University, an MPhil from Yale University, and an MDiv from Iliff School of Theology. Her publications include: The History of Game Theory Volume I: From the Beginnings to 1945; The Foundations of Game Theory; and Women of Value: Feminist Essays on the History of Women in Economics, among others. Her work is published or forthcoming in Agave Magazine, The Broken Plate, Euphony Journal, Mantis, Penumbra, Scarlet Leaf Review, among others.

How to Behave in Free Fall

Let any farewell wave 

to those who threw you

bear a freight of arabesque

irony.

Make no pretense of traction.

Had you a briefcase? Decide 

to drop it like a solemn pill, 

or to open the latch and loose

a cascade of the life you had,

the pens and calendars,

old lunches, notes on duties

and systems that have melted—

a dun-colored rainbow. 

For you are alone now. 

Savor the chill. Lift your chin 

to the fine free abyss. Panic,

after all, will only make you thrash

against nothing—

for you have been removed 

from all the walls and stairways,

even from the rough-stoned dungeons

that used to give you purchase.

Think. Breathe. Prepare 

to find some meaning in this?

Watery Ways

Up to 60% of the human adult body is water. According to H.H. Mitchell, Journal of Biological Chemistry 158, the brain and heart are composed of 73% water, and the lungs are about 83% water. The skin contains 64% water, muscles and kidneys are 79%, and even the bones are watery: 31%.

“The Water in You: Water in the Human Body,” Water Science School, usgs.gov

During the pandemic, she said, she tucked herself 

away, with family, in their strong-walled home, and tucked

her pain away like toxic treasure, partitioned from the hoarded

hurts and cares. Sometimes, she tucked herself into the car

and rolled, encapsuled, to a car wash where the waters

scoured the windows and she wept, awash and buffered 

in her small sad submarine.

                                              He logged the decades

of chugging frigid seas. Yes, the bunker was afire—

energies amassed to power a speedy passage riot, ignite

to threaten those who dare to use them. The only cure for fire

is burning, in the furnace as in the stockpile. The flaming needle

of his story threaded ports, shores, people who came and went

to give and take, and those who crewed with him. And the ice fields!

The glaciers loose fresh murderous bergs whose wake 

can thrust new waves to lob old menaces that lurk to gouge. Weaving, 

that hot ship drives on and on, always twisting through cold 

shifting paths until its thread is shattered. Then down, slowed,

engulfed, its fires quenched, heat cooled, all those energies that thrust

and are confined made still, and sinking, till it finds a place

of rest. A sanctum. Deep. Gently, the flesh all melts 

away. All metal softening into union with the salt, the sea,

the oxygen that once had whipped its fires. First 

come the sea stars and the crabs and all devourers of the lapsed

and lost. Then plants to wave and barnacles to crust

a woods for fishes. Titanic refuge for all whose voyages

are heavy, pressed, unsprung, too hectored and too lumbered. 

No ship can withstand some stresses, no captain some blows.

He can rest among the naval architecture, slowly sorting 

cargos lost and treasures scattered, learning who made 

the mattresses, what camera the pastor had, which gems        

were worn by whom. When living’s storm-wracked, menaced, 

flaming, you can sink into the quiet fingering of marvels

made by naval architects and others, limned to define 

proprieties, the levels of society that sailed, 

combusting.

                     A seaside child with a fraudster dad,

my mother romped at the 1930s seashore, mewing

to gulls and subtly starving as her skin ate sunshine. 

Then, waves were friends secure against the tides 

that hauled her family from name to name, to desert shacks

where dinner (and a jar of rattlesnake tails) came

from her brothers’ shotguns. She floated well, but longed

for calm where truth could be her lifejacket,

and her ship depend on no false empty winds.

She looked for ladders. Categories, degrees, lists, she thought,

could be her handholds. So solid, so demonstrable, and she heard

that scaling them with step on sturdy step would lift her.

The more her trust, the less sure her mooring felt—not anchorage

but slip. Robert’s Rules of Order, the skill of shorthand,

lists of things to buy and things to do erupted from her purse.

They did not save her, though the piles of paper rose

around her—full, she was sure, of important records

slid between the sheets. No SOS met answer that could free her.

And I? I live where lakes are scarce and rivers

raided. Yet often I am driving on some highway thrashed

by rain, peering to catch sight of trucks whose drivers

defy the hazards and the hazard lights. Perhaps

their mighty heft grips road where puddles lift

me, small ponds wait unseen to slide me into panic and the shattering

of journey on a granite cliff. I am doing the best I can, 

the best I know. Moving forward through the storm, 

and tuning vision as I can: my fragile guard. My bag

holds phrases, words, lines that might become something

with meaning, for a life of process.