First Place Winner, December 2003 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, December 2003

THE DEAD GIRL TALKS BACK
Laurel K. Dodge
(Melic Review RoundTable)

Don’t believe the lies. Falling ain’t
flying. One small step into nothingness--
then big regret flails and grabs
at the thin, thin sky. Grace,

absented. You don’t go mercifully
blind; the earth, a benevolent curve
from up this high flattens out fast as it rushes
at you--desiring to collide

with you more than you desire to collide
with it. And the biggest lie of all:
You don’t die before you hit
the ground. The last sound you hear

is the crash, your body shattered, a slammed
window, the panes rained out;
all that remains, a framed emptiness.
I found my meaning

in this riverbed. I writhed life-like
as maggots fattened on my death;
I filled the silence with the thrum
of busy insects. Each track petrified

in the mud is a mouth I fed.
Buzzards picked at my ribs, crows bickered
over gristle, coyotes skulked off
with the best bits: the heart,

the lungs, the liver. Man walking your dog,
cop, coroner, I know you mean well--
but sometimes the missing
don’t want to be found. And the dead

want to be left alone, unmolested.
Look at my scavenged bones.
I’m beautiful. Leave me here. I’m part
of the landscape now.

Judge Wayne Miller’s comment: “This dramatic monologue in the voice of (presumably) a suicide has a strong and commanding tone—one that is unflinching in its address of violence, death and decay. By the time the poem comes into existence, the speaker has already died and more or less rotted—much like the speaker in Lynn Emanuel’s wonderful poem, ‘The Dig.’ What makes this poem stand out to me is the poet’s control of voice and line. First of all, that ‘ain’t’ in the opening is a small and subtle gesture that goes a long way toward giving the speaker a distinct voice—one that remains distinct and confident throughout. I love how the quirky descriptive moment of the ‘thin, thin sky’ is followed with the startling and well-controlled stanza break between ‘Grace’ and ‘absented.’ And the imagined details of falling and hitting the ground are strongly sensory, which I think importantly address the limitations of man’s perceptive register. I find myself especially drawn to the poet’s choice of focusing on ‘the last sound you hear’ (italics mine), followed immediately by the wonderfully apt image of the body as ‘a slammed / window, the panes rained out.’ From there, this body starkly narrates its own decay, which continues until the end of the poem, where human imperfection has been stripped away and the body has become ‘beautiful,’ ‘part / of the landscape now.’”