Samuel Washington Allen Prize, selected by Charles Coe
South of Gomorrah, the ambulance enters a traffic circle The wheels squeal the conundrum of opposable thumbs The Scream by Edvard Munch and not a single moral compass among the tire rims Paramedics work the code, compress the heart and oxygenate the brain They are Yahweh and non-binary pronoun They will not rest after six days They are cut from the same cloth as those in Amazon Fulfillment Centres You are the fire and the remnant, wood ash from the year one million shrunken toothless gene from rotting rootless tubers that they may know you the already but not yet The second time you die, you mount the painted wings and giant rings of Puff the magic dragon You see jugglers and stilt walkers, smell cotton candy and corndogs, press the soft sex between your thighs against vertebrae, ball and socket grab the reptile’s mane poll to withers, synchronize thrusts to hydraulic pistons and receive penance in the afterward from the preying hands of dirty old Uncle Rick he of the neat trick with a dry hydrant and a quick slide tool so, Puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave At Mercy’s Own, you are jacked four ways on radiation and intracellular poisons You can’t speak so you prophesy become a tympanic structure of scream and fart and belch and stomach bubble an influencer for the piles of menopausal bones that litter soiled linen and porcelain thrones Veins of fool’s gold run the lengths of your arms, quicken like mercury into your finger tips and burrow into the earth’s core Who will prospect and sift your wisdom when nuggets of gold are sold with barbecue sauce and a paper crown at Burger King? says the dragon, beware the spear Outside, the cicadas sing day and night and day They are town criers with writs of execution You imagine the thorax and legs and head in red coat, white breeches and tricorne hat The news is not good from Black’s Law You will live a long life and die ignobly These bellmen have not come to roll the final stone and testify to resurrection They troll and dox with their cellular sex talk and deep fake video of eggs buried in glands and nodes as much for parable as procreation You experience their phantom vocal chords as piano wire in the blood flats of anal fissures and periodontal gums but their brief song next to your jingle has abdominal air and three pairs the legs It is they who will finish with long sharp nostrums planted in carbon remains time for the sponge, says the nurse and you are peeled front and back splayed and sprayed and scrubbed like old fruit beneath a commercial wash He runs a comb over a largely bald pate creates sterile rows of psoriatic scabs from a failed regimen of apple cider vinegar trims nose, brow and ear hair and deftly burps the stoma bag sutured to the pink flower at colon’s end Anus, testicles, penis and that abdomen hole have become estranged neighbours or failing businesses in commercially zoned land or the four horsemen of faith, obedience, humility and justice or suits of cards in a game of diminishing returns you came into this world with coins on your eyelids the better to buy passage into blindness and death And you watch Pat Sajak spin The Wheel of Fortune and Vanna White turn the letters and you hear the cheers of the studio audience and the cheers of the slaveholders at NBC and CBS and you don’t know if these are the same wheels and puzzles that built the pyramids and dropped a deuce of tons on precarious labour the same wheels and puzzles that gutted millions in Aztec temples the same wheels and puzzles that fitted black folk for fetters the same wheels and puzzles that felled buffalo and First Nations the same wheels and puzzles that launched Little Boy and Fat Man the same wheels and puzzles that produced numbers and tattoos for kenneled Jews and the same wheels and puzzles that champion vulture capitalism and Ted Talks and the kind of media penetration that requires an exit interview and a rape kit and you don’t know that Pat Sajak is a jealous god and that High Priestess Vanna White has replaced the Wizard of Oz the dress of one the curtain of the other and that the great reveal is a wicker statue that has no meaning in wind and fire except to provide rest within lines of elegy your imperfect epistemology has been re-tweeted to satellites in the jet streams of outer space while prophets in their own home are without honour and the dragon remains in its cave seated on its treasure hoard asleep Between fever and stupor, you dream of your all-inclusive honeymoon in Cozumel, fall down the rabbit hole into a skunk pool of Bear Stearns exclusivity It is unclear who looks in the mirror over your shoulder your first wife or your boss or a blind man who uses his white cane to tap out dits and dahs and it is unclear if he counts out human lives lost to climate change or the complete list of all genders or the number of times that pundits conflate the debates and you, your wife, your boss and the blind man share your meals with cicadas the length of small forwards in the NBA share your bed, the hot tub, the swimming pool, the tennis court and the massage tables with creatures whose wings are cloaks of invisibility from Victoria’s Secret These exiles from the land of nymphomania have come to score defend and rebound within four to six weeks of full court press You can draw only one conclusion from this steam bath of sex and death shuttered away from the poverty of frijoles tortilla and coca cola: LGBTQ is the theory of everything you didn’t see coming Later, another dream coalesces like shuffled image files from vintage snuff video You add to your maladies Not Invented Here Syndrome refuse to admit that the horror of it was workshopped beneath the big top at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and Wounded Knee and My Lai and Andersonville Prison and Kandahar and Dachau and No Gun Ri and Haditha oh, come on, how many pop-ups do I have to kill? It was so much easier to eliminate pixilated targets using light pens and joy sticks in Florida or Virginia your second wife said so, she a craven animal who didn’t murder for pleasure or pollute her own shelter or take a fist in the kisser the better to see and count fifty neatly rowed stars she ghosted you after that she made a ghost of your ass Now you’re getting your phosphorous and your asbestos mixed up You burned the flesh of innocents with the first and amortized cancer with the second Is that irony or poetic justice or the sharp edge of Occam’s razor? Even the guards find work after the war hark in thine ear: change places and handy-dandy the hours are the same Anyway, you were just burning tokens at the arcade air dropping that nasty shit over Al-Sawad what your own trade folk called plucking the goose because it’s all white and it’s all like feathers This one’s a gut buster: the way you confuse laissez-fair capitalism and munitions that ignite flesh and bone Phosphorous ordinance scorches the eyes of babies and pillowcases of goose feather create a perfect snow globe around the immolated insulators of church, market and hospital Allahu Akbar And who were your own snow gods? Your own perfectly held beliefs in domes of antifreeze? Did you kneel to General Custer or Barnum and Bailey Or Adam Smith or management of the New England Patriots? All that remains in your mind’s eye are tropes of poetry: Rhodesian ammunition chest rig, a pile of beard hair in a sink helos and mike-mikes, one lone laptop whose screen saver is a picture of white Jesus and the crystal clear encryption of WhatsApp, both the platform of choice for launching an airstrike and popular caption for image macros: now I am become Death the Destroyer of Worlds Otherwise sanitized by the publicists at CNN and FOX as Warner Brothers nanny corporatism and the risible cartoon violence of that erasable Bugs Bunny: WhatsApp, doc? It seems the meals in this place have gone into syndication The turnip, the beef, the peas and the tapioca hit the arrivals board as announced Says the steward, we’ll move dessert up in the batting order It matters little to you which of the four bats lead-off or clean-up They all finish their sentimental journey in the stoma bag like the Executive Branch on the tree of good and evil or the politics of Walt Disney Dessert for the dead is not at all like the austerity you preached on the home front how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat? Gifts given to your daughter were wrapped in current events and regifted to disadvantaged kids You achieved respect and hatred in a single kiss like Judas Says wife number one, it’s not all about self-loathing But you had no alliances, no Color to Go swatches from the paint store no pathway to game theory no parade with the mayor and justices of the peace You were born well before identity politics and you long ago recused yourself from the social function of language as communicable disease The Joker doesn’t speak for you and the Riddler leaves no clues Your points of anthropological contact are Batman fight words in your neatly clipped bowel: swish! swoosh! thunk! and plop! It would all be so degrading if not for America’s Got Talent You look into the deep fake faces from Madame Tussauds wax museum and lift your hospital gown to reveal a bubbling slurry of leaking rotten egg You play that hole as an Australian didgeridoo or a drone pipe or the kind of trumpet used to fell the walls of the Fourth Estate Each contraction of your abdominal muscles produces a burping misty note from the Star Spangled Banner memory of revolution and Rococo macaroni wigs and real time septic sludge that dots the stage like the stool of Dali and Mapplethorpe and the judges immediately stand and straighten with hands over their hearts and attend the end of the HMS Terror to send you and your stoma directly to the Live Show in L.A. and it’s no small coincidence that each presses the Golden Buzzer at the very moment that Alfred E. Newman presses the starting bell at the New York Stock Exchange he of what me worry? and painless dentistry married in an instant to Simon Cowell and the stink of the cutting room floor lo, the spear will have its day and tonight, the cicadas are cruel ministers of the black arts The devil is their consort and you the shining man They will gore your daughter as they have every day for three thousand years, seat you in the ring and compel you to witness blood and dream of solstice was there a measure of pride in her death? was she not unlike Brad Pitt playing Achilles? did not the javelin begin its flight as olive wood on the slopes of Mount Cronion and finish in the stadium of ancient Olympia? But the cicadas favour fake news and Facebook algorithms arrange themselves into fighters, lancers and sword pages stage bull worship from Mesopotamia and kabuki from Kyoto stand on hind legs, use wings as tunics, beaks as swords make hand drums of stomping feet and spear the neck to lower the head and dampen the knees the kill shot is that javelin Sport’s Day on South Field an egregious impossibly sick joke you long for cancel culture and the end to tasteless comedy By the fourth act, you will die to continue the lie or lie in state with methadone, PTSD and whatever shiny thing a flock of Jim Crows has pinned to your uniform under the golden arches you said it’s your choice, honey book or toy? The grief is too much and not enough our ancient brain conspires to make us overeat The dragon knows better than to sacrifice and pray he sits on his treasure hoard all the livelong day he will make no vows and suffer no fools with his tongue, he eschews mythology for the dank crevices between his jewels At night, you would go to him and he would hold your tears in his hands ojalá and his body was eucharist and his own tears wine ojalá and he would listen to you speak of Yolanda hour after day ojalá and his hands made open your ribs and he planted there the eggs of your enemies ojalá and he drew out the poison with his mouth ojalá and his name was Sam and he held you through Strauss and Leroux ojalá his love as great as Yolanda’s absence ojalá You are woken by the exit of one ghost and the arrival of another 4B has stolen a scene from Airplane! the movie swallowed a rock of fentanyl stuck his head in a hangman’s noose and used a 3D gun to blow brain matter onto his NRA Golden Eagles card it takes a vet to euthanize a sick animal that’s the standing joke, isn’t it? The other ghost is your own There you are floating just below the drop ceiling i-Phoning video of the death of the empire and the death of the empire of the senses Your body looks like a coat hanger its sides and vertices an empty vessel the hooked head a decimal point for integer and fractional bones Still and all, a lone mercenary works the current and the paddle and the script like an avenging Fury the cicadas sing a coda with their tailpieces the dragon composes a cautionary tale each prepares you for for the day when all the world will be carbon neutral The third time you die, you float out and into the night air to spectate your own parting The cicadas will ferry your last minutes with their own You and they will have done with sex and violence and blather and food and psalm strike up the orchestra one last time with tymbal organs, wing flicks and clicks and stridulations submit remains to the ancient loom and bid adieu to the dumbshow in the upper and lower chamber and in the holy see It is the loudest song sung in the insect world
Dean Gessie
Dean Gessie is an author and poet who has won dozens of international awards and prizes. Among other honors, Dean was included in The 64 Best Poets of 2018 and 2019 by Black Mountain Press in North Carolina. He also won the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award in England, the Allingham Arts Festival Poetry Competition in Ireland and the Creators of Justice Literary Award [Fiction Category] from the International Human Rights Art Festival in New York. Elsewhere, Dean won the Frank O’Hara Poetry Prize in Massachusetts, the Enizagam Poetry Contest in California, the Ageless Authors Poetry Contest in Texas, the Indigo Open Poetry Prize in England, the Spoon River Review Editors’ Prize in Illinois, the Southern Shakespeare Company Sonnet Contest in Florida, the COP26 Poetry Competition in Scotland and the UN-aligned Poetry Contest in Finland [in honour of the U.N. Climate Change Conference]. Dean’s short story collection – called Anthropocene – won an Eyelands Book Award in Greece and the Uncollected Press Prize in Maryland. He has a book of poetry forthcoming [goat song] from Uncollected Press.