Eulogy After Brian Turner s Eulogy It happened on a Thursday, sometime in the morning as children rode school busses, and birds flew back for the spring. People went to work and sat at desks watching clock hands tick to five. The sound of half smiles in a living room full of bad news. It happened like this, on the first warm day of the year when my father swallowed alcohol and capsules. The sound of the word death, foreign in the mouth of my mother and nothing can stop it now, no matter how many cards or flowers or leftover food is left on our doorstep. No matter who prays in our living room, the seat is still empty, the room is still quiet.
Eleven Sitting at the kitchen table, I didn t know what our knives and forks were saying as they clicked and clanked against our empty plates. But it didn t matter. It didn t matter that I didn t speak in silverware tongue or that, most of the time it was silent. It was ours. I was eleven and I didn t understand what it meant when my mother s fork told me this table would always have his empty seat and my mother would always sleep in an empty bed. I was eleven and I didn t know that the people that tucked us in at night could die. Or that they could want to die. Or that something like this could happen to people like us, who sat around a table.
In a Middle School Hallway There was nothing to fill us Nothing to prove to us tomorrow was on the horizon. We did not know that our words actually could mean something. That the whispers by the lockers stuck to the inside of eardrums. We were given a morning. The sound of a blue sky. An alarm clock. We didn t know if our bodies were hungry, or just crying for help when our stomachs shook. The weight of our flesh upon bone, felt beneath ankles. Not enough to live, too much to die.
Alcohol Poisoning: a Love Poem His body extended past the end of the hospital bed. Pale skin dressed in paper. Eyes, clouded red from tears. Two drunken irises surrounded by two sober purple under eyes I held his hand, the one free from The IV. And he told me not to cry told me not to say I love you. But there, in the sterile air under the thin blanket, He still looked so beautiful.
Heart House Coming through the aortic front doorway my heart looks like an average house. There are walls and a floor to stand on. Both atriums are modest, with furniture constructed from veins. When you walk through my heart you might have questions like, Why is there a hole in this wall? Or, Why is most of the ceiling falling down? And the answer, sweet potential tenant is, because it is broken. Yes, the rent is cheap but there is arterial scaffolding holding up the hallways, blood vessel spackle patching holes in the kitchen trying to hold this home together. You ll see, as you walk through my left ventricle, a door. Pulsating with bulging veins, with the sounds of beasts behind it. This is where I keep them. All the things, the people, the loss, that has ever broken this home. This is where they live. They are your new roommates, if you chose to stay.
On a Beach Somewhere in Connecticut A mother tells her friend, another mother how many calories their children should eat. A young boy shovels. Thinking he ll reach the other side of the Earth. He doesn t know how hot the center is. Teenagers huddle around a blue cooler, drink clear liquor stolen from the bottle their parents hide in the drawer of the dresser. They throw a football, the girls have rib cages surfacing on their skin. A woman complains about her iced tea, sweetened. Her lotion is lost, the sun is in her eyes, her body is not what it used to be. We re all sitting in our folding chairs exposed, toes between shards of shell, watching water bottles wade through the Long Island Sound, but still, it is an oasis. On a beach, somewhere in Connecticut, there s a girl. Too afraid to remove her safety-blanket-named-cover-up, but does.
Beneath the Leaves The sun brought me back to the dead end road on the first day of spring. Riding bicycles up and down the street, only stopping when reaching the busy main road. Peering into traffic as if we were standing at the edge of a cliff Looking at the sharp rocks below. Cars blew our hair in the wind as they passed by. The air, too warm for our down jackets but the wind, too strong to take them off. The first sight of sky since October. I learned how to do a cartwheel on the small patch of grass in front of the home that had a swing hanging from a rotting branch, a river in the backyard with loose mud at the bottom that sloshed between our toes on a hot July afternoon. The sun brought me back to the uncut grass in May. The big oak tree that collapsed just missing our roof. The asphalt, the basketball hoop hidden in the woods. Covered by leaves and years of neglect.
The Inability to Encapsulate it The moments fell around me like rain, hitting my tin roofed skin. I let water from the Hit my body, turning it red as it beat Bruising me purple green yellow down. sky My body became a supernova.
The Moon and This Dying Earth The stars, like headlights, on the New Jersey Turnpike stuck in constellation traffic. The moon called down to me and I stood peering over the edge of this once green Earth. I climbed the tallest tree, rotting from the inside. I watched, as she moved the water-bottled-filled waves in her hands. I looked in her tired eyes, at the smog from the city below, hanging like, sweet nothings between us while we watched the world end.
& It Did I was born to a woman, who swallowed flaming swords and torches. And I grew inside her match lit belly. She fed me flowers so I could taste the Earth. She let me smell the fresh cut grass, so that I would know there were little happy moments--- the soft swing of a hammock underneath stars, A bird, finding shelter in a rainstorm. Today, morning air is warm, ground, cold. And day, looks like mist hanging over a wooden porch. A woman, Stands with a torch-fire hand on the child, still within her body and whispers to the hazy sun, Stay for her