BPR 43 | 2016
Winner of the 2016 Collins Prize
For ten years, I swallowed
stabilizers, psychiatric pills
the color of sky, lotus-petals.
For years, I slept in a coffin
rack with blackout curtains,
listened as Dyer jerked-off
above me, listened as Graves
wept for home. After war,
I slept on a secondhand couch
in our unfinished basement,
floating on a gurney of waves.
All night I remembered
the worst beauties: sea abloom
with bodies, drumfire
in the waves’ whitecaps. Now,
my wife sleeps alone
in our bed; I sleep beside her.
My fingers turn to sand
inside her body. There's nothing
more medicine can do.
Johnson’s skin was blue when
he surfaced—the dead do not care
how their flesh will appear
to their mothers when they rise.