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Wake Up, Please Nora Tumas Best in Show Poetry
I often wonder how my double-O generations of plastic hapless America cleverly destroy their bodies in the evenings or why they don’t, why we always wake shaking and slump-tired from peripatetic earth and body sharing, from our cigarettes tracing ladders, the ladles and the dog-stars disguised by crepuscular mist, where we’d be smoking in lipless polka dot dresses as the sun crawls over fountains hemp scratching faces necks genitals arms feet and we ride piggyback through water jingle jangling and thought-aware, the Turkish scarves dragged in curbside puddles by newspaper fields of new corn and wheat and stem where I live upstairs in tapestries in nipple painted walls and wood and through you, where we pierce our noses and your noses and we survive the summer by throwing out our shoes and everything we own, where I follow everyone with Polaroids with oils dripping from my apothecary bottles and giant foolish murals preen some muscles citywide, when we dream of sliding back to New Jersey and hoboing the milkshake joints and lazy bars on the sides of highways, we’d pour milk and milkshakes on the hobos’ heads and help them jerk off on the overpasses of Route 130, where twelve-year-olds roll freshly plucked sassafras joints in Palmyra and pretend to dilate as absolutely nothing happened, where she contemplates quitting mountain school to hula-hoop in professor-less drum circles, where we overhear them in the circle of the cafeteria-mensa claiming that German is the only real language and what you say are made up words, you told me you maybe understood, but that giant marble buildings with wigs on them were not as interesting as elegant tourist cliffs and Harold revamping hearses in Arlington copycat cemeteries or California scarred steeples pointing towards San Francisco, surfing balls-high on fuzzy curves over sluggish seas, but more subtle and interesting was smoking in the tree with four angled trunks in the middle of the monuments, where we’d smoke in the tree and climb up the tree, drink under the tree and piss behind the tree and walk later drug-sprawled in the basin, stagnant fifty stars half a mile over, where four and five weeks later we had a ceremony in a white-walled hallway filled with doors and silence and we drank Kava root, mud root, toothpaste, bowl knee-high: I was an animal getting special K anesthesia, I was an ‘80s New York club kid and I was in the war cutting off the frozen limbs of soldiers like me, where Birsu—Turkish and scarved—would tell me 11 was the number of open doors, let them in and let them out, and carry numbers in your pockets for when you need them, but her boyfriend looks like my older brother and I wonder what the point of praying for three hours is, she prays for three hours every day, she wraps black skirts with scarves, evil eyes watching from the kitchen, copper sink, kneeling, begging for interesting children who were more like me, where five years ago hybrid J.M. and I listened only to glam rock and spoke only in tongues in Polari to varda the Omi Palone and to tart up music like a prostitute, like a Christmas tree, watching Haynes films in filthy basements and cuddling, glad all thirty close friends hated learning, yes, we hated it together, Anita! I wear all your clothing went to your grave and stole your stove and closet, racked up the sweaters and patent-leather shoe collections on top of my body so I smell like you and remember you until my Russian perfumes take over, smoke and mothering are lost, you’re lost, where you ask why I’ve become what I hate, a drugged drunken soul-searching soul searcher, when six-years-old we were searching souls, but before the last 19 years I teetotaled a rhythm of knit and purl and crisis criss-cross and walk in lines straight folded and paper can’t be folded more than seven times, don’t even bother trying origami,
AMERICAN LITERARY MAGAZINE