Mike Turner

Honorable Mention 2004

Prop: Moon

If you spun off one of the pointy ends of a half-moon,

dollar store ribbon tied to your waist, you’d only have

enough tension to glance into one third story window,

wanting to know if love acts the same in private. As you trail

downward you’d turn a bit before the terse movements reminded

yourself of an animatronic character who hopes the next

boat of lovers passes by while you’re facing towards them.

You anomaly, romance doesn’t work like that; it’s restaurants,

knees against knees under the table acting like it’s Broadway

for those adolescents sitting a table over. Love becomes curly

checks from waiters, lovers become extras cast to sit on

the village fountain, as pamphlets murmuring of revolution

die as a layered hush over in the corner. The man and woman

notice you dangling from the acne scarred moon from the fountain

and question your existence for the second you deserve.

No affirmation is found in public displays of affection,

only the insistence that love is bigger than a bedroom

and has more to say than just the mere sigh of those four walls,

though kissing is painfully without voice. Lovers do all things

and imagine themselves as such. Fuck you and your moon

they say, as they bounce intertwined in a celestial ballet,

prancing arcs devoid of their own talents, but filled

with the imagination of an ignorant child, believing

the moon the creator of its own light.

The Suicide Poem

Maybe you’ve seen them. Those two lovers embracing,

corpses, not even zen-like, but fatalistic in the finality

of violence. Though death wasn’t violent, it was gradual,

distinct, which is why one of the pair still has her eyes

open. And you sit in your room with lighted bulbs

strung around, each one emanating intuition, subtle

like when your friend waits for you to pass out drunk.

And everything leads to those lovers, moments of laughter,

driving home, all leads back to that girl with the open eyes.

You envy her in some way, the fact that she can still be sad

even in death, that she’s still waiting. You live on small stuff

like white rice and opening your blinds to feel a little more

closer to the world, but you’re still a cutter

and your roommate has started hiding knives.

You can feel something climbing up the sliced rungs

of your arm, you pretend it’s those lover, one a little less

farther back than the other and more uncertain.

The scabs are slices of a rock wall, vertical permanence.

There is no permanence for the lovers, when the coroner

comes to pry them apart to answer the questions of when,

how, and such to make people feel more comfortable

knowing you can’t simply die together, embraced.

But you can will yourself ever so close and cut the grass

flattened by the lovers and pin it against the wall.

You need daily reminders or so it seems because you can’t

avoid them because you have more in common with death

than life and the last thing you and that girl need

is for someone to love you.

Sorrow Wraps

Tighter like rope around a tree,

as some boy is doing right now,

except he knows that when people

see it they’ll think of it happening

in a time when they’ve not been alive.

You have to dissociate yourself

from moments like those, when you know

that rope lays dead against the trunk

and it wasn’t put there because it was

a burden to carry. Or maybe

it was a burden as he saw tiny sacs

attached to the rock bed of a stream

pulled as if by mystical ropes. If only

he wasn’t alone and he could say

they respond but don’t move.

Then you can tell him, it’s like rope

against rope. And you’d both be too young

to know what that means, and adults

find it too cliche. Though he separated

the ropes before wrapping them and on

it’s way to wilting it was, for a moment,

a kind of propellor.

Residue

Hypochondriac nurse crouched in the unisex bathroom,

she’s the only one who still cries, and she spreads

her arms across the handicapped bars, her body thins, threads,

then billows in conversation with the fan. A patient walks in on her,

she smiles and slowly evaporates, released as fumes, moisture

in the sky, a burst saline bag. He wipes off the toilet, flushes,

imagines the tubes a precious balance of pressure rushing

and responding. Even water is another selfless scaffold.

In the geriatric ward a woman’s gown rings her ankles

like sloughed flesh. She wants control, the kind infants

lose in their sleep. The scaffold will breathe against its iron

as it swallows what it left minutes before, the water exactly

as it had been.. Nothing here is missed, but the seventh

floor is convinced the pressure has weakened since winter

pulsated. The fourth pulse of the year, enough for the brain

to continue its choreography. A woman who had her uterus

removed came back months later. She said she left something

she missed here. Biology lies, the receptionist reminds her

as she tells her again that she didn’t get her operation here.

An elderly man in the gift shop waits as the attendant washes

her hands, losing her most intimate cells, they leave the romance

with the body. She somewhat turns her head, tells the man

location is arbitrary, she directs him to the receptionist desk,

empty, sign reading, Be back in five. The receptionist

is in the bathroom, bent acutely, she flushes the blood,

in moments it will diffuse into the water, never having

been blood at all.

Brethren

The Pennsylvania cousin is pregnant. When she’s born she’s going

to end up being everyone’s baby. We’ll make her fall asleep fast

so she doesn’t have to see her life, so she can’t grow up like we think

she will. We’ll each put out our wrists, milk drops that ghost

upon our veins. The temperature goes straight to the heart. I won’t see

this baby – I can’t bear to watch it suckling the mothering cat and becoming

something feral. Darting tongues massage more feral from her. She’ll grow

up despite our efforts, genetics are too strong. We might hear her knocking

over garbage cans, hopefully someone will shoot it, before it gets

to the rest of the houses. You wouldn’t shoot, would you?

She could creep up on us creating her own art in bars and liquor store lines.

We’ll see her when light darts off her eyes into our own and we won’t

actually ever be sure she’s there. When we hear her we’ll be pissed

she came masked by night, pissed that she didn’t need to be cultivated

to make herself be noticed. I can’t pretend that I don’t want to be out

there with her too. I want the stealth, the surprise of no one seeing

me coming. Me and her could learn together and dodge some bullets.

She would make me stop feeling guilty for taking morning shots of whisky

and waking up amidst empty beer bottles. People like her

don’t need to hear their own voice in a room full of bullshit to know

that they’re alive. Me and her will humble ourselves with six packs

and make loud, sweaty love with other people. Perhaps you’ll hear

our DNA mix with carnal energy and become worried that even your kids

will be disturbed by what happens at night.

Anhedonia (i)

Perhaps he was actually trying to commit suicide.

No, Phineas Gage was too American for that,

too industrious, and all dreams, though the greatest

pleasures are fleeting. When the tamping iron

was rubbing against the rock, flint to flint,

the whole scene electrified with sexuality,

like smoking a first cigarette alone. The charge

detonated, everyday after, the refractory.

When the iron passed through his brain,

that’s when the love began, the brain a coiled

mattress conforming to the metal. Neuronal fingertips

became lips as electricity and iron sensitized

each other. The spear wasn’t a bullet, something

that can’t be found after fired, the most profound

romance.

Anhedonia (ii)

Harvard Medical School

Skull, tamping iron, and life mask each varying

in permanence and silence. The curator finds

no pleasure in the retelling of the story, but still

comes back to the room and moves each piece

slightly each night. Entire lives are spent centering

around arrangement and there is no metaphysical

re-emergence for these objects, no fusion.

He’s taken the iron off its stand, brought it to

the break-room, feeling no transcendence,

no third leg. He thinks of the skull, the passive

victim, less breathing. Condensation forms

on the inside of the glass of the life mask,

a cataract, something that films upon the surface

but penetrates. As a child he used to bury

carcasses he found in the woods - an enormous

event imposed on a tiny life lost and once

he saw a mouse at the bottom of a pond.

The still water, glue, the wells of the mouse’s

eyes held two opaque bubbles. The eyes

and water – sameness. He couldn’t reach the mouse,

its decay delayed each winter, though

he wanted to bury it as he wants to bury the skull.

They are all kindred, skull, tamping iron, life

mask, mouse – nothing.

Anhedonia (iii)

A single glance at the MRI screen allows

the doctor to remember that there are no eyes.

No magical vespers swirling like gnats that

disperse when walked through, but they appear

to close air in greater concentration when seen.

His sadness lets him think of himself as something

not himself, so he stretches across the patient’s

eye socket, letting te world become a flood

instead of stasis. There is no possible way

to swirl outside oneself, to see finite points

of dialogue, reactions, walking to your car alone,

to finally define what has been constantly

diffusing. He thinks he’s touched the patient

in some way, that she imagines a glance saying,

leave your husband, but the lips moving

produce, the nurse will fax the results.

She doesn’t become alienated, since she remains

in concentration, always someone else’s

eyes on her, and no one willing to walk through

her. The doctor knows he can alter the insignificant,

that he’ll press print, that in doing so he’ll kill

the magic of the brain. He knows what she sees

inside of the machine and he calls it empathy.

She swirls inside the machine, finally

aligned against the barriers between flesh

and metal. She knows they’ll see inside her,

as two people simultaneously wonder about a time

when finally surface would be enough.

Murder, Seconds Before Love

for Konerak Sinthasomphone

I found him curled up, scaley asian dragon,

actually a cold blooded lizard. His soft body

bent like rubber, a smell that melted Detroit

into a ring that we could roll through other cities

and say “hey look, look at how this blood both

pooled into and evaporated from cement craters,

our harsh moon, our empty center.”

When the drill entered the back of my skull

I felt it gripping like two mythological hands,

a metallic force strong enough to bully humanity

onto its side. My cerebellum remained, so I could

as well. I breathed through my new hole, a reverse

blow tube electrified with the ends of severed

neurons, though at that time I made it outside,

found a huge expanse of lighted night.

The dispatcher said the police would arrive

soon. My last child, I had a cesarean section

for. I sliced and fell open, a moist, steamed

loaf. I’d like to think she oozed out of a rapturous

crack and that the birth was slow, and

we were washes of color. You know black

was the last color skin that boy saw.

Fragments of my brain dissolved so quickly

that I wasn’t able to fall in love, couldn’t tell

him my name, my story, the fact that I slept

in a barn two weeks ago. The sun warmed

hundreds of worms to surface, each one

individually cannibalistic and programmed to betray.

I had time to fall in love then, as my retina

drug behind. I left trails and forgot

to keep secrets.

Oh yeah, he was naked, I think the cops

laughed, little naked asian boys do look

silly. I remembered seeing blood,

they razed that house and built a playground

and those metal parts are always greased,

they breathe like pores, ya know. Children

can’t play with all that breathing around.

Taste stopped or became purely metallic,

the metal of blood, the mechanics of acid.

I became primitive and the lush mothering

greenery capsulated, something I could take

with me when I die. It opened in my stomach,

a sheet of rust, the chains of a child’s swing

coiled throughout my intestines, my tongue

the shiny lip of a slide, manufactured in Pittsburgh,

another place I could have died, could have died.

The Adoption Process

I dip my finger into the tip of the finished condom,

like the curtsy of a bell that descends around my room,

the reverberations infinite. I wipe my finger on the wall,

the smear of a femur, a lung, depression. Nothing

is longer than these moments when life didn’t come

out of the ocean, because the ocean is just sex,

and any excretions are semen.

Imagine, squids pushing, an enormous muscle

pointy its tentacles towards the center,

underwater black milky smoke. Having children

is the only possible way to experience yourself,

a clarity that haunts, but keeps a structure alive,

even when submerged. A man and woman

went into the bathroom together, the sink

is turned all the way up and I imagine time as paper,

lines, boxes, the life of two miscarriages.

I feel the passage of a whale pod

and the discharge of the grown fetus,

but it’s not a fetus, just small orbits of eggs and sperm,

and the space between them is constant.

It’s like the space between a look-alike son

and father, it’s the space after these words

that the son speaks which are, “Daddy I love you.”

Tap Foot for BJ

Library public restroom, Freud’s psychoanalytic armchair,

where homoeroticism has taken up refuge, since the genitals

of the homunculus deflated into the head. Bathrooms are attuned

to pastels where muted declarations exist in either immaturity,

or honest effort. This bathroom has no whistling pissers,

whose fluting betrays feigned comfort, levelheadedness, even they could

have written, “Tap foot for BJ.” I’ve tapped thinking someone

was actually crouched on the toilet, dedicated

to their private cause born to public enactment; the bathroom

is no place for theories, defense is unnecessary. The words

are written beneath the dividing wall between the stalls,

a bisexual’s sick joke. There hasn’t been a time when looking

at the hurried writing didn’t fold, then later unfold, unfold, unfold.

The cerebral affinity of the homunculus is meta-cognition, a continual

grafting, as I double check between couple’s hands, trying to find

secrets in the bends of wrists or the gait of walk. I become the patient,

jealous of all the life they’ve managed to create, a person on each

bubble made convex by the splash of urine, a lying yellow fly.

I feel disingenuous, I’ve inherited desperate scribbles in bathroom

stalls and I can’t even hold hands with women. I stole his curiosity,

chipped away at the paint, leaving an amoeboid metal with a genetic

script of its own, a script that will erase man’s conviction in the unknown.

He was optimistic and there is no place for that in bathrooms

where the jagged echos of men fell on ears as anxious whistling

or were beaten back into them - swallowed like semen nets, and there lies

the masochism, suspended between eradication and birth.

with a bottle — a bottle that didn’t even smell like a rotting battlefield,