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2020 William Carlos Williams Prize

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FAILURE IS THEIR ORPHAN—THREE ACTS



by Julien Brugeron

ACT I How I Ended Up in Bumfuck, WV, Counting Trout Eggs When I Thought I Was In For a Cruise in San Juan it is admittedly the best effort one can make to live one's life to its fullest but if one gets rid of the pathology of superlatives and discard the impersonal one here alone i confess i have failed to live my life wondrously and cogently instead i’ve been counting trout eggs in Bumfuck, West Virginia caveat: i am no staunch millennial i have nothing against trouts nothing against eggs against West Virginia but PLEASE share the utter despair i swirled in when slathered with sunscreen and wearing gossamer-light rompers i was ready to pull out my best squeezed-to-death lemon-like adjectives to laud my amazing airbnb host and the filtered sand (instagram-filtered not coral) and the reef of restaurants and the mercilessly-extracted-avocado toasts i had already twisted into a story I – INSTEAD –took a wrong turn on the road of existence (hadn’t seen Molly in days though) and was made to get on a bus that took a gazillion years to arrive in Bumfuck, West Virginia here i was immediately greeted by an imperative party of Bumfuckians who told me you are needed to count trout eggs and count trout eggs you shall my eyelids gaped in a beg-your-pardon abyss but since the long trail had deprived me of all my life-saving p c hedge words i smiled through the non-conversation and complied "what the f is happening" you may quite purposely ask well great minds ask alike as i was actually wondering what the actual f was happening anyway cut a lifelong story short i found myself pressing on trout abdomens forcibly smiling through the counting of the redish oozing eggs when it suddenly dawned on me i was probably either some Truman-Burbank or Brautigan knockoff i looked at the trout i had in my marblish hand and out of curiosity or benevolence or simply respect asked her if i may press on her abdome

she said nothing because she unlike me was a trout. And to this day i keep my asking stance for it is the only thing I can commit freely ask if it’s ok while knowing it’s not but doing it still      and it’s been years and years of trout eggs counting now and let me tell you this if trouts or Truman Burbanks were asked for their consent more often i would never have been trumped up in Bumfuck, West Virginia askingly counting trout eggs for a living while i should be in a nondescript somewhere like say San Juan.

ACT II Mnemosyne unbound All of you subpoenaed in a lawless trial CASE: the hackneyed and timeless and yet hitherto unsolved fact You can forget. I can’t. You speak because you forget You write    wield    mortgage time – spent remembering –    build marble memorials    engrave gilded plaques    patch up apologetic speeches    hate      because you forget I don’t speak nor write nor wield nor build nor engrave and I love since everything I have ever – fill in verbal blank –    is etched into    my every endothelium    the body you see is just the physical result    the moving scar of the world’s transitivity I ignore the language of oblivion memories like self-birthing crackling eggs chime in uncalled for. Be me – be surrounded by the archives of your life – your body a vessel and all the crew from the admiral to the rats minutely write their endless impressions in the log – Apennine ranges of boxes and folders and within them: scrambling faces also sketched within your eyelids – deep cracks into an

ACT III II. III. MMXX if you and i here meet – then mornings are done for me skin and bones rotting deep under clear sprouting larkspur and a growing millennial tree no answer will you be given but those etched in the inner side of your eyelids like prefixes meant to forbid i sudden virga all over your life without me – all around your arms and your terrestrial history its entrancing syntactic din choking your phony’ll fall short of our sym – quiet passing blasts blowing like the air of your lungs – the air that the dead envy taste the light tears of the free touch the skin that loves speak the tongues that die and listen to the mercury streaking down the marmoreal me when you were given – my simile love cadence brazen black tea – the letters you read and m: murdered limbs asunder no doubt no new dusk would come for me should you swing by my empty mineral bed – the earthly kingdom you all dreamed for m- my thousand hands m: falling star my sea – then please unshade the words yet unheard to me then ple

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