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boundary 2 28.1 (2001) 107-109



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Bottom

Tina Barr

for Darren Bernstein

The boy’s lips puffed open like a cartoon fish.
His flesh a paste the color of bruises,
blood a pudding; his insides are
a salmon’s on its run as it drives
its leaking organs upriver.
Someone has opened the shutters of his ribs
onto the window of his viscera.
Some walking autopsy caught him,
shot him, turned the boy over
into the river. Emmett Till, remember.
When they dug up the metal coffin,
twelve years after, Frank found the head
outside the bag, peeled it, the way I used to rip
the skin off chicken. The skull his template,
he builds the boy’s face in clay. [End Page 107]

At fourteen I was made to read Catullus
who wrote about a sparrow’s death.
I penciled in tiny letters above the Latin
each word’s English meaning,
pieced bits of syntax together
so a bird, a woman, a speaker
made sense inside their cage of letters.
How could I translate
my hands holding the warm bottom
of a Pyrex bowl
tilted under the lamp shade’s hood,
so I could look at what my mother
was going to show the doctor,
the red my brother had thrown up.

At Shanghai’s temple of the jade Buddha
I bought a mud-smeared shell, a turtle’s belly.
Someone had scratched in its surface
pictographs: China’s earliest writing;
stick figures carry bows beneath cribs
raised to hold seeds or for leaving the dead
among little scattered arrowheads.
Easy to read: kill, die, food, child.

Frank rows us close to the turtles
who climb each other’s backs;
their claws cleat them along the logs.
A turtle splays its rear legs
like flat ends of a tongue depressor,
its head swivels right, then left,
steady as a dowser over water.
Another’s shell is propped; his forelegs
paddle the air before him. Striations
of yellow run in the olive of his skin.
Swans dig into their feathers;
one rolls the side of his head
on the long tether of his neck
sliding his beak across his back.
Oarlocks catch in their cylinders and rattle. [End Page 108]

Frank tells me about wading
through fog in the bottom;
he could see far ahead and behind,
nothing below his chest.
His dogs ran ahead, leapt up like fish;
birds flew in and out of it.
As kids, Frank and his brothers would lift
a snapping turtle from a pond
bottom, slice its flesh into pieces,
take a bucket of parts to their Mamma’s kitchen;
its heart would still be beating.
If I could pack the boy back,
shut the carcass and breathe it together,
I would make him my brother.

Tina Barr is assistant professor of English at Rhodes College in Memphis, where she directs the creative writing program. Her poems have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Brilliant Corners, Chelsea, Harvard Review, Louisiana Literature, Southern Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in June 1999 and 2000, where she worked on a series of poems about Cairo.



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