Andrew Nurkin

Andrew Nurkin

THE NOISES POETRY MAKES

I had zoned out, at first counting the numbers

in Fibonacci’s sequence, then considering

the idea of California as a kind of limit

that approaches infinity, and then

measuring my pulse the way my father

used to in church, and then remembering

a meatloaf sandwich I had one time as a kid

at a roadside café somewhere near Big Sur.

To this day, the best sandwich I ever had:

lightly toasted sourdough, ample slice of meatloaf,

just the right amount of mayonnaise.

And my whole family was there in the sunshine

on a road trip along the Pacific Coast Highway,

my brothers cutting up in their windbreakers,

my mother making little oohs and ahhs as she

gestured toward the ocean with a potato chip,

my father opening a Diet Coke and rolling his eyes

because I couldn’t shut up about that sandwich,

which I was just now having again in my mind

for the umpteenth time when the woman

at the front of the room finished reading

her poem about her difficult father and a rusty can opener,

which apparently had picked up some symbolic meaning

in the several minutes since I had stopped paying attention

so that the last line was pregnant with

charge and emotional resonance, causing,

after a pause, a chorus of audible exhales and low sighs,

the noises people make at poetry readings

to let each other know they have been moved,

that they love and can have their breath arrested

by poetry, the same sounds people make

when they sit in the electronic massage chairs at the mall,

exclamations of unexpected sensation that cannot be

suppressed and yet are muted for fear

of seeming uncouth, half stifled chortle, half

guttural sex groan heard through a hotel wall.

It must have been a damn good poem

because everyone seemed to be giving off

sympathetic cries and muffled moans

struggling toward articulation, a room

momentarily full of Meg Ryans in the throes.

And I, too, let out a little sigh, a soft but

audibly approving coo,

not because I wanted to go along with

the crowd, though everyone around me assumed

my noise, like theirs, owed to the difficult father,

but because I had been thinking about that sandwich,

could still almost taste it—sourdough, grease, mayonnaise,

picnic table in a gravel parking lot, penny sun

over the Pacific Ocean—and just the memory of it

gave me more pleasure than I could silently bear.

—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Andrew Nurkin: “Though I like going to poetry readings as much as anyone, occasionally my mind wanders. But the thing I love most about poetry, and poetry readings, is the dialogue a poem can open up between different points in time. The best poems I know are ones that knock me out of my lemming linearity into the free-form expanse of memory and experience.” (web)

Andrew Nurkin

THE CONTEST

Most mornings, even in the wet starvation covering everything

after the third snow in ten days, and for reasons I suspect

but am in no position to confirm, my neighbor comes out back to piss

on his garbage can in the small paved space between our houses

just below the window I stare out while pretending to read

but really trying with coffee and first light to melt the sleep,

the sense of already having blown the whole day, wasted the minutes

before they’ve even happened, though the municipal garbage truck

is just now beginning its arachnid climb up the street.

The birdbath in the middle of his yard still topped with snow like a

coconut crème on a cake service, the ones you see in diners down south,

delicious from this distance, and the tacky little cupid flag

his wife staked by the fence for Valentine’s Day now thankfully obscured

by a solid twenty inches of compressed erasure. I hear his screen door

slam and look up hoping to see his Tsi Tzu, whom he calls Terry Theresa

in his gruff mutter, the vocal illustration of enmity for the whole world,

even his damn ugly dog, as in “Terry Theresa, get the fuck out there and pee,

you turd,” hoping to see her bolt out the door, skid and slide

across the frozen yard, yapping in distress, this at least a moment of humor

at their expense, which is, I can only assume, what my neighbor

is searching for, a comedy of canine perturbation, when he flings

spoiled cold cuts over the lilac bushes lining the fence into our yard,

which he does often, slices of ham and bologna my dog gobbles down

with glee behind my back, barks for more of, scratches at the door to get,

this platter of salt and meat so unlike the dry kibble and occasional carrot

he’s used to, so new to his stomach that he vomits it up a little later

on the kitchen floor. And this is why the vengeful part of me, the raging part,

longs to see Terry Theresa yap for help as she careens

like a failed figure skater into the fence. But my neighbor follows her

out in his bathrobe, sidles up to the city-issued garbage bin

to relieve himself, and as I stare somewhere between the window

and the top of my screen, trying to take in the scene for its pure absurdity

but also revolted, for my neighbor must weigh almost three hundred pounds,

so full a man that if he were not dead I would swear I lived next door to

Marlon Brando in the later years, but it is just my enormous sonofabitch neighbor

pissing while I watch and don’t watch at the same time until he looks up

and somehow finds my gaze, and, knowing he has caught me

though I still refuse in the fragments of second that pass to meet his eyes

straight on, spreads a smile across his coldcut jowls, waves

with his one free hand, which he then lowers and uses to pull back his

bathrobe to show me his dick in full stream. It is then that I lose my nerve

and look away completely, an action I later interpret as defeat, though

what triumph would have been I have no clue. Perhaps triumph

would have been opening the window and pissing on his head,

or tossing chocolate-dipped milk bones over the lilacs, which would be the end

of Terry Theresa, or having lots of extra loud sex with strange men

right next to the window at all hours, which might be what pissed him off

to begin with, but these are just fantasies of triumph,

so all that is left to me is to write this poem, and there, now I’ve done it,

written a poem about my fat neighbor who feeds my dog deli meat,

urinates in the snow and exposes himself to me in the raw cold,

which is exactly what I needed to have done to get on with my day.

—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

__________

Andrew Nurkin: “Though I like going to poetry readings as much as anyone, occasionally my mind wanders. But the thing I love most about poetry, and poetry readings, is the dialogue a poem can open up between different points in time. The best poems I know are ones that knock me out of my lemming linearity into the free-form expanse of memory and experience.” (website)

Rattle: Poetry

… without pretension since 1995.

July 31, 2012

August 19, 2011