Creative Writing (Poetry): “Strange Conscription: Ekphrastic Portraiture in Sonnet Form”

Strange Conscription: 

Ekphrastic Portraiture in Sonnet Form

Honoree, 2021 Ora Mary Pelham Poetry Prize

lenny bruce 

with newports and dutch cleanser i will explicate

the life and times of lenny bruce,

comedian. he was, in all respects,

an honest man: the son of migrant jews,

he served a year in navy blue before

returning to new york (where he was born)

to try his hand at comedy, performing

his “unnatural act” on stage. in forty-seven,

brooklyn gigs paid plates of free

spaghetti, all he had to feed his daughter

(born with honey b, a stripper he

had dearly loved). in sixty-six, in hollywood,

he died. “my life—” he’d stood and slurred

one night, “my second-best four-letter word.”

les charbonneau

with every rotting hemlock trunk he stripped

of bark—and only grew the mass of ceaseless

trees—the trapper cursed his strange conscription

with those damned explorers. “jean-baptiste,

mon fils: viens, viens, aide ton papa!” the boy,

no more tree-cutting skill than that which his

eight months among the sagamores and voyageurs

afforded him, ignored the business

of the elder charbonneau and floated

tawny fingers upward toward his mother’s

face. she touched them to her lips. her throat

constricted as her husband felled another

tree. the younger charbonneau’s eyes followed.

she—the woman charbonneau—sighed, swallowed.

joseph merrick, ‘the elephant man’

his head, too large to lie and rest for even

wrinkles in a wretched night, reclined

upon a stack of feathered mats, naïve––

to think a normal sleep would soothe the mind

of such a beast. “the elephant,” they called

him; christian name long-banished to the drawer

beside his hospice bed. therein (recalled

the mangled soul, within whose mien there moored

a heart intact, a heart intact!) a scrawled

calligraphy there lay: an envelope

whose tender, looping script he—if at all—

would look upon alone. that maudlin hope

to which he clung sustained his fallow years;

no rest, no love, no trunk to suit his ears.

ring, looks old, of unknown provenance

a mother’s ring’s repose, among the grooves

and flows of human hand, contains a story

to itself—a timeline—as behooves

an object whose design demands a quarry.

another matrimony sold for scrap,

a wedding band of forty years whose staying

power inexplicably evaporated

at the wake? another way,

in father truman’s words, to make the sin

that she and you created pure before

the lord? a little piece of her, an instant

love, a true memento more important

than a memory? a future finger yet

untold, to have, to hold, to pay the debt?