Runner-Up, 2 0 0 9 C A K E T R A I N C H A P B O O K C O M P E T I T I O N MICHAEL BURKARD,
Final Judge
Box 82588, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15218 www.caketrain.org caketrainjournal@hotmail.com Š 2010 Lucas Farrell. Cover art Š 2010 Louisa Conrad. Used by permission. Printed on acid-free paper in Kearney, Nebraska, by Morris Publishing.
The author wishes to acknowledge and thank the editors who published versions of these poems in Alice Blue, Boston Review, Cannibal, Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2010, Greatcoat Magazine, Handsome, Inknode, La Petite Zine, Strange Machine, and Zero Ducats.
for my brothers
STITCHES
The bird fell from the sky. Let me be clear: The bird. It fell from the sky. And I was the first to discover it there. I happened to have a razor because I was told I should shave. Instead, I sliced the torso and sniffed. I sliced the torso with a razor and pinched the heart to see if it would flap like a fish and carve my wrist with its scales. It smelled like a fish. A bird smells like a fish. and I was relieved because I had long thought it true. I said to them, listen. Let me be clear:
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The scales will slice my wrist, that’s why I want gloves you fucking asshole hicks. It’s not that I am a girl. I am not. It’s just that, do you want me to smell like that. I will smell like a fish. And you wonder, you wonder why I don’t shave. Do fish shave. Do birds. Do birds shave. Answer me. What do you have to say. Here it is. It fell from the sky.
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Bird any damn kind. —Kenneth Patchen
I
SO, THE BIRDS DO COME HERE TO LIVE; I WOULD
sooner have thought the birds died here. I have been lugging the sack full of feathers and hearts. I counted sixteen goosanders, four tufted ducks, a dozen godwits. Four eiders, two sandpipers, a single phalarope, a single nightjar. Five black guillemots, five buffleheads, two shovelers, a common coot. I saw a goose as ancient as ill-advised love. It came here, I suspect, to die. It reminded me of a can of pears opened and spilled out onto an enormous white dinner plate, begging to be quartered by the outer tine of a fork. For some amount of time I too possessed the hand of a child. The grip of a child. But who can say. I looked on my map. No, it can’t do any harm. The main thing was to traverse a number of courtyards, each equipped with a pair of birdbaths dating back to the 50s, a world with its suspenders up, its sunblock within reach. My bowels are boiling. The tundra where the moonlight beds down also beds down, for there is no moonlight, only the glint of it in the eyes of the sheep which are everywhere strutting the new violence. It is not of their making. That much is certain. The tundra accepts the terms like a can accepts its role in fending off winter hunger. There is a world isn’t there. The girl did not comprehend. The blue of her eyes, the shades of blue, the shades! were dissimilar. I wanted the world to know that I had taken note of this difference. One: acrobatic blue, swinging back and forth
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through swaths of a polar sky. The other: a bobbing, rotting, arctic-bound lime in a lasso of ocean. I saw this as my moral duty, to note the shades (for there are in the indigenous tongues dozens of names for the various shades of twilight) and also to demonstrate the bulk of the bag as I lug it northward at a rate of 8 kilometers per day. It is slower and slower going. It’s been a week since we encountered any buyers. Father, she said, you speak but make no sound. For some amount of time she too has been a child and possessed hands like a child. Let us assume that one of us, having witnessed the new violence, fathoms at heart the least of the victims, reaches out. Let us assume this. And what else: I expect a miracle / says the bird to its immanence / as it descends from dignity / I expect the grass to be this tall / the moon to wear an impatient dog face / the fields are only lonesome if you love me / will you love me / you should call your loved ones and tell them you made it here / alive / heave yourself / into the light
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Translations of
MY REFRIGERATOR LIGHT MAKES ITS WAY TOWARD YOU Into the 34 Languages Spoken in the Many Woods of Grief
If man was indeed born when the first animal wept, then it should be clear enough why I have been dying to drown. —River of Life
If it weren’t for my refrigerator light I’d acknowledge the incandescence of the bird in my refrigerator, the one I understand to be a regular bird, just a regular old bird without a head.
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I’m afraid she thinks I’m her telephone voice. I’m afraid she thinks I’m her nose in profile. I’m afraid if she saw me, she would very nearly recognize me, lost as she would be in the many woods of grief. Don’t touch my things, she would want to say— so say it. Like anyone else, I quote the many woods of grief. For instance, the moon here is divided into thirds. The moon is a love triangle dropped in a flour bin (its white cloud outpour incorrigible, soft). Months come and go as if bearing fresh trout for supper. You, me, our awesome appliances. I’d like to use that toothbrush, please,
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the one with your face attached. In the orchard of beloved green apples, there is a relinquishing of the city-body, city-self. My refrigerator light is one weir in the River. Like the flesh of a stranger’s elbow in the backseat of your mother’s fears, wait for it (my refrigerator light) to brush up against you. You whose seawater floods my acoustic guitar. In the way bees dodge raindrops in the night, given their capacity for discerning particular shades of black, I’ve spent a lifetime searching for the darkest frame of film, exploring every public archive in the many woods of grief. This country of I know what you left unsaid as my refrigerator light makes its way toward you.
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The dial-tone equivalent to my unfamiliarity with aspects of myself. All that is clear is that everyone around here drinks so as to employ the vocabulary of the birds we’ve hunted to extinction in the many woods of grief. I am fortunate in that I happen to be a pretty good-looking dead thing. For instance, I could never imagine what it must feel like to be asphalt in its infancy. When the doctor asked me to have a little faith, I told her to expose her right breast so I’d have something to press my unholy against. Your words are the house lights coming on after a double-bill screening in a theatre I was led to ungently by the wrist— the words whose sole effect
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is reaffirming how real this world we live in must be to live in. No one is ever so alone as in the moment he asks for the check and receives an incandescent bird where the dinner mint should be. This is not a precise enough translation of what I was unable to tell you the night you became something other than moonlight in a drawer. I want to and do believe in bird and in you.
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we were obsessed with a field in a field the light was on you too the question just stood there the firing squad was heard in the distance the light bent back on my immediate mind fell like deet on a forearm distantly, I spoke of the tradition a field of elders the waiting grew loud and curious
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Lucas Farrell currently lives and works on a small goat farm in Vermont. His poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Jubilat, Diagram, Cannibal, Mid-American Review and elsewhere. He co-edits the online magazine Slope, and is the author of a previous chapbook, The Blue-Collar Sun (Alice Blue Books, 2009).