Colby Meeks
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Young Writers Award
2020-2021
it was autumn
and the air still carried that alabama summer in it
how it seemed to burrow in the dry, burnt dirt, grab us by the throat,
and smother out that ember-glow smolder until all that was left was the raw pulp
of a well-worn despair that laid deep in the pits of our tonsils,
the long-stemmed bronchi of our lungs sticky with humidity, the forest of our strung-out and unwound vocal cords.
those were the days of seafoam lockers and that stench of dust and sweat; when
we bled white before we bled red those shallow-shaken lines where our flesh was pulled apart and
we prayed for it to put back together
sitting by the half-dead honeysuckle bush that bush where we kissed but never told where sneaked past the fence to the
ditch where the rain water puddled like baptistry
that shallow, cool water where we washed out our own sins it was in that heavy air when
sorrow was woven in between the sugars and the phosphates of our dna,
desperation dripping from our desert-dry, sour-cracked lips, and deep cut and raw-worn skin around our
crescent-less nails that dug deep in the near-mold of soft-skin oranges, at the lunch table where neither of us ever said
i love you,
where we learned starvation,
where we drowned in everything we never spoke, where we half-locked hands as if somehow
that would heal us, that would save us
from coughing up memories that neither of us wanted to remember: everyone who sunk their teeth into us like low-hanging fruit growing heavy on the wiry branches of the tree on the edge of eden.
but we were not saviors,
and honeysuckle was not communion, and even white blood stains.
he was nineteen when he went to the war baptized in the bloodshed
and the stench and the taste
stripped down to nothing but instinct and death
but you know--that boy loved poetry seemed to find in the worst of times that way the smell of rain was so soft and gentle
no matter how heavy the storm and
how the sudden stillness after a baby’s crying was so damn calm, but
he found
no beauty.
because in those days the rain just
washed away those deep, heavy puddles of traded souls and letters no one cared to read anymore; because in those days everyone knew the reason the crying stopped was not content. and so, he died:
when he saw those endless miles of people, and people, and people, and soldiers;
when he drew a line between people and soldiers;
when a farewell to arms was
gunshot-blistered and blood-shot stained; when he was the only one who didn’t.
they called that boy shellshock
saw the way he didn’t sleep,
the way that the art was drained from his skin and his veins and his blood and his soul,
the way that he was drained of his soul;
saw the way that he never stopped mourning:
he never grieved, but he always mourned.
it was perpetual, for him, the way he seemed to carry it
in his canteen and his rucksack and the damp sole of his combat boots. it ran in his blood and pushed through him with every
pump pump pump of his heavy-fallen heart
after the war
when the bodies were buried:
in the cemeteries of hometowns, in the oceans of sunken ships,
in the monsoon-sat valleys dripping with despair
and the soldiers all sat tightly in midnights wrapping themselves in dirty blankets and
bummed cigarettes and military-discounted whiskey trading each other poker-chip-stories of those backwashed nightmares of those everythings of nothing.
they called him ol’ shellshock
as if they didn’t all carry their memories in their rib cages and the bags under their eyes but
something about him was different
the way he walked in that sulken sort of way holding his breath before he breathed:
it seemed he never knew if one was coming or going; he never
stopped mourning.
that way the war seemed to rip him apart and spit out those
half-a-boy-and-half-a-man pieces in the graveyards of his bedroom how he buried his scars in the folds and heavy cloths of trying to forget
wrapped in wool and knits and denim and anything, god, anything that did not smell like
the sweat of two-weeks-of-warfare with bloodied sleeves and bloodied legs and bloodied bodies
he held his silent prayers in the back of his throat
with the feeling of almost-crying and a back-run-nosebleed
but ol’ shellshock just died too fast and too hard and too full and too much so when the other GIs who died slower and softer and emptier and just less drowned their troubles
with jack and jim and jose
ol’ shellshock was just left, sitting in the cemetery where
art was nothing but bodies and yellowed grass trying to remember to breathe.
virginia--
do you ever miss me?
miss the nights that we danced in a bronze-burnt candle flame? the december that your lips were
decadence; vice; chapsticked epicureanism don’t you know that you taught me love?
taught me to waltz around in masks and midnight--
i trace our love out in those rivers:
potomac; shenandoah; opequon
but i suppose you should know that.
virginia, don’t you know i loved you? virginia, don’t you know you were the only one left?
virginia, i would still love you, today, if you just waited.
but, virginia, i don’t blame you
because poets are so damn hesitant to jump, and it was december and the water so damn cold
virginia, i am sorry
for the way i watched from the banks
in the overcast shadows of that long winter.
you still haunt my dreams, virginia,
my body the deathbed and the cemetery-- virginia, i am sinking in wuthering heights
virginia, i still love you.
am still remembering kiss & smile & laughter & christmas eve;
virginia, i am waiting for the day you are more than dream and memory again.
virginia, the water is warm now;
the bank is overgrown with a thicket of blue and white
and i skip stones to memory’s impression of your heartbeat.
the dead birds in the backyard rot in time with my mortality
flesh fades to bone fades to mud fades to dirt fades to grass fades to yellow grass fades to dirt by autumn i will not remember the dead birds in the backyard
i will not remember hollow bones splayed out in awkward angles on piles of unmolted feathers i will not remember the lawn mower blades cutting so recklessly just above the carcass
i will not remember decay sinking so slowly into such an unforgiving earth; my heart beats in tune with some gospel song on the tip of my tongue
and the backyard is all dead grass and dry dirt. the ground seems to
wail and cry as it swallows death whole but cemeteries have always been
so peaceful. and i sit by the bradford pear having already shed all but its branches for the year sulking in the silence and calm of the aftermath of dying. and my bones begin to ache
in solidarity or fear or preparation.
Three years old and she watches the world fall apart, running through toddler hands like an hourglass’s sand, this was when the world knew she would never grow wildflowers in her lungs or make gardens of her body.
Nine years old and her father buys her a small nightlight, tiny bulb with a pink half circle wrapped round it, this would be where she learned prayer. Where she learned faith and pixie-dust, laughing and smiling like picture-perfect little girl on movie screens.
Eleven and fireflies are glowing like a simple sort of domesticated fire, lightning resting on her fingertips: she was not scared of fireflies.
Twelve, it is the first day of the seventh grade, and she cannot stand the thought of walking down a hallway she cannot see the end of. She strides hesitantly, not gently, and it feels like a kind of chaos that will never be controlled, that is the problem with chaos.
Seventeen and the world feels like it is in a jar.
Eighteen and she leaves with a couple boxes and barely a scholarship. She leaves her nightlight in the wall, because she does not pray, anymore. She leaves her nightlight in the wall because she has not been scared of the dark since she was eleven, and when she was eleven she found anyway to find light, in fireflies and TV screens that should be not left on and in the glow of a tiny bulb that was always on the edge of fizzling out into nothing.
Eighteen and the room is dark.
Eighteen and it feels like she cannot breathe.
Eighteen and she remembers the feeling of claustrophobia, remembers the feeling of the world falling through her fingertips, just faster and farther this time.
Eighteen and the world is so very small. Eighteen and she still does not pray.
Eighteen and she tries so hard to forget the feeling of falling. Eighteen and everything is foreign.
we ran into each other in some store
wandering aimlessly because both of us hated being at home you’re too polite for silence
so you ask about how i’m doing about plans for the future but
i can tell you’re holding back so
i ask you what you really wanted to know and you ask me
when did you fall out of love with me?
i do not know how to answer
because i know that really i will always love you at least a little
find parts of you in the nebulas inside of me
in the margin notes i scribbled in the great gatsby
in dreams and nightmares and the way that the sunset surrenders to night so i just tell you
i don’t know
and both of us know the reason how at the end of the day
we died in supernova
becoming blackholes that nothing could escape but it was late
and tire seemed to hang from your eyes midnight wrapped ‘round your body so we both leave and
when we you were just out of earshot i whispered a small, timid
i love you
if i asked you to run away and marry me
what would you say? somewhere we can drown on dandelion seeds and wilting honeysuckle that barely tastes anymore. elope at the courthouse, take magnolia leaves like
wedding rings, and just drive--
until my ford sputters empty and we just sit
putting flowers in our hair while you sing something
like vows. and i will whisper i love you in every
form and structure and language i know.