Writing Contest Winners

3rd Place

dirge.

by Adam Wilson

in green pistachios, she: dead. her tan rot dress. and she’d said he’s dead like that, and a here, here’s his car (she hates it, always has) & a i’ll just walk home, i’m only buying these nuts, so i can walk home. what do i do with her barely-motion of lower jaw quivers? her smallish steps. the abandum of his life left as hard facts.

(1) With my mom at lunch 1. My mom at lunch said, “Mary had this classic cheesecake when she was here and loved it.” 2. At regular intervals she proclaimed, “These shoes were a good find, honey, what do you think of this blue, you two, like Adam’s eyes?” 3. When prompted with the question my sister & brother-in-law would reply with praise 4. for the shoes. 5. The other three at the table, my sister, my sister’s husband, and my mother all very much enjoyed eating as a form of entertainment. 6. They enjoyed their tongues in a restaurant while I was dragged there, but eventually feasted with my eyes. 7. There sat a procession of rawish red meat dishes and old gentlemen with silver & gold necklace charms resting deep in chest hairs; a young lady sat with them and thrust life into their environs. 8. A thick pendant choker about her neck had the feel of an elaborated urn. 9. As I admired her dark, polished neck I reknow he is dead and cremated and now a nonconversation conversation piece on his mom’s sleek redwood mantle. 10. She glances at me with amusement, a smile like we share a secret. 11. She is inheriting their wealth through those teeth.

—i know it adam, that maybe love is just evolution’s next step to separate people among good & bad mate choices for the incubating woman; it is nothing but a new gold junk to help certain penises gain advantage, that’s why i can’t really love, you know; i have too much meta to fret and strut about the stage: he. always he with these irony pieces, but in this car is where he said those things that hurt the covers of things. i: barely understood ever what black holes the words his mouth produced, and i did then look out the dirty window at another car, but he went on and so i got it that, say that girl there, no girlie rather maybe (it was long ago she had that butterfly & now demarcates cosmetics like neat political maps) in the cherry car is what. button nose beneath capsule sunglasses. it’s not sincere, i learned from him, and he, he still though would admire her and say he was her and conscionalized too much his good & bad parts . . . he said. she knows her ass (probably, or some other part) is a nuzzler of lusts and that makes her refashion its natural bounce to something she thinks bounces yet better. those people can never love how it is, but rather want things interfered with and of smooth forms fresh like newly polished apples.

(2) In the parking lot after lunch 1. My mom asked, “How did you get his beast of a car, Adam?” I mumbled a nothing. 2. Somehow I figured that if I found out five days late from his blank mother in the produce section, she can wait seven. 3. My mom says, “It’s a pretty car, if he fixes those panels. It looks to have died several thousand times.” 4. Its antenna is broken at the hilt.

but, because, recall, crystal screeched her yawn at my joke (heard a thousand times) into a terrored throat when she’d turned around to his car, bee collection in the rear window, and she broke the thing when she retreated. bleached sun larvae of no mouths, spring sprung amid fibers with passing jumps to live. dead in various stages. from different bee-eras, families. some had flown back there initially and somehow brought in more so that whole generations had been born to the back of this car & tried & died from the confusion at the clear window and the fact they couldn’t leave as they wanted. if only a piece of their antennae could have pushed through the glass.* and chromosomal strands rewove through the interior fibers and maggot babies and blind things wanting to taste their inheritance of eyes and flight. a little museum in the rear of his car, but he’d never vacuum it out. she did cite his cleanliness, one of the final bits in the departure manifesto she piled on when she finally left him, the other reasons being too true of her thoughts and making her more in allegiance with that girlie we both alternately loved and hated.

leagues of slabbed concrete leviathans, cornrowed tombs, the cold shackles of those vectors he’d rant of, they’d allow a bit of flex, but he went to burst his heart against them maybe. —which finally did it though? what form its facade? that’s what. which tower from that shimmering plantation leaned its tower self back a bit away from the sun (he was already in the thing’s shadow i know), let its shadow out a fraction and reeled it back fast to have its shadow-self couple with its ferro-self upon my hunched friend? like a cartoon dilation and noose retraction of the iris, maybe. Maybe both/all of them. so he was there— all the gray he went to to just leave this white, searching out the most handsome thick bridges and starving outside the delis he wrote me about so with letters like Of Course in a way that i could see me penning them to myself from that place because it was as the beauty in all his wounded handwriting had always been here alongside me, and that little part of me that he took there, an eyelash maybe, but feeling more like an upright stomach that climbed into his bag and slumbered the whole car ride out, and i think maybe he felt it and wound it about his belt when he went out because i too learned. but maybe his time would have been better if it didn’t start with him trying to beat the meter maid before she cited him, (but i cannot think why that building didn’t pull to here too when it ground him in his cower.) maybe if he had looked at the letters before he mailed them he would have smiled from them too, grown a warm limb in that swirl jungle he loved.

(3) Watching TV with my family 1. My brother always tended to flip the channels very fast, so as not to miss any update. 2. My mother was getting annoyed with him for not resting on a program and just watching it. 3. My father couldn’t understand the words the people used on reports, being too abstract. 4. They asked me what I wanted to see, and I, I— i can only know anything when it’s about your death, especially with tv on, i can no longer watch —adam, each time i watch those tv programs i cannot find a thing about the entertainment it’s supposed to have, all that drubs through me is that i’m spying on my enemies, that i’m spying on half-witted enemies . . . — like that, all the awful things you’d say that fractured my every bone so that i couldn’t even breath or read or think. but you were right, i know this, if not always, then at least for the ecstatic breaths in senescent concretes. you spoke the ugly things beautifully so that i couldn’t be upset by any of it, but rather formed a wise armor inside me to help me. still, you did cry of it. it kept you honest, not having enough meta to see your gifts in this laughable world; you never did laugh. i still think you could have without changing the awareness of your bounce . . . your insomnia, the baby steps you’d promise you to help get you out of bed each morning, the horrible truths flying from your hunched-in face . . . 1-falling down before our mothers/ women in apology 2-fathers want to remove daughters before puberty so they’d miss men’s dark caverns hidden in project 3-consu-capital breathing on our time 4-Grecian gratitude . . . and how you’d sever me with severe detail on why you could not write despite its ceaseless ohm in your mind—your too much vision and not enough naﶥt頴o engineer it much. that, or the seeming hypocrite who warns of sorrows even he cannot step over . . . that only time you ever let me drive this beast, you were too tired, remember, and we had come back from

a Very Fine dinner with your Mom and your Dad in their Cabin, and you didn’t care if i destroyed it, as long as i drove, and that traffic jam, where we were next to that one car of frattish-boys in well-selected tans and navies, a music to play their stereo on, so enormously loud you couldn’t hear the words as the mouths really formed them. . . .

—but turn on the radio, adam. anything. i want to sleep.

—it broke remember, crystal, the antennae, bees.

—on though, on static then. it’s when you just want silence, but the outside is going on and on with itself, so just turn it on. anything. if not private silent, then at least that noise of your own choosing. even when it’s not the best, at least it’s your tongue, teeth, eyes choosing . . . but isn’t it choice that got us here? . . .

i think i’ll keep the bees to wherever i take this piece, but you, though you wanted everyone else to, you never heard it when that girl: (sang)

spring is short . . . i grope for

my full breasts with both hands.

* but no


Adam Wilson moved to Seattle from Littleton, Colo., in 1999 and is currently pursuing an English literature degree at the University of Washington.