2018 Ora Mary Phelam Poetry Prize

In Tommy Nevins pub, a man saunters by

 in black pants and a button-down shirt.  

He asks my name; his British lilt sharpens

 the Ts on his tongue. 

 

 He asks if Lisa is short for Elizabeth.  

 

 

Perhaps he likes me for my name:

Its double b and t hint at a slight British origin,

 the British love for redundant letters. 

 

My Dad once claimed

we were loyalists who ran away to Canada 

when the Revolution began.  

How did the Native American creep in?

We don’t really know where we came from…  

 

                                         I rather like Lisa, though.  

                                         L is a long, thin letter 

                                         with a right angle,

                                          as if light hit

                                         a sheet of water 

                                         before bouncing

                                         off.  If you write 

                                         it in cursive,

                                         it’s just a single 

                                         loop.  My mom 

                                         chose its 4 letters;

                                         easy to write, but 

                                         easier to mold into 

                                         anything I want; 

                                         casual yet hip and

                                          sophisticated.  

 

                                         the girl I want to be,

                                         has a blonde bob 

                                         and a bold, thin 

                                         body.  Slightly curled.

                                          Perhaps, she is wander-

                                         ing down a serpentine 

                                         London Alley, or posing 

                                         by a molten 18th century 

                                         cannon with soot and

                                          gunpowder, glad her 

                                         ancestors had sense 

                                         to abscond from both

                                          the Motherland 

                                         and the bloody wars

                                         that ensured separation.

                                          It is always hard 

                                         for the child to break

                                          away from the shackles

                                         of an overbearing parent.  

 

                                         Perhaps, what attracts

                                         this stranger to me

                                         is my affect name: 

                                         its faint allusion to

                                         his English roots

                                         coupled with the long L,

                                         like a long pike

                                         in rebellion.

 

 

name, he declares, in his high British pomp.  

 

                                         He barely moves his mouth.  

                                         Lisa. 

                                         In his whisper, 

                                         the s slips away

                                         into the silence,

                                         if it had ever been uttered. 

 

 

I walk along the lake 

with Geoffrey Hugh Brett Dommett,

 as the pier juts out into the moonlight.  

To him, however, it isn’t just a pier,

 but a reminder.  Its metal beams arc 

over the water like the bridge 

that he jumped off on May first

 into colder waters.   

 

 

He grabs my hand suddenly—

and drags me over 

the flourwhite sand

 towards the lake.  

I resist for a second 

and laugh; I can’t stop: 

 I tumble down onto 

the blanket of sand, 

pulling him down

 with me onto the long

 grass for the first time.

 

I remember

I remember falling and flailing

I remember sinking into the skeletal stone

the hard lines angling into edges that cut

a skull into the face of our boulder. 

Your face is round; long hair blows

 in the saltless breeze above the oceanless water.

I scream, afraid to face how the opal sheers 

into  a glass marble mirror.  

Graphite hyphens efface the commas

in my blind eyes.  Your lips dash against mine. 

 I feel the stars against my back, my lips my thighs,

they blink faint shadows into the faint sky;   I blink into

their lines of light.

.

 

Bats soar in shadows

deleting the night—

I think city lights reveal

their wrinkled hide, mouse-

heads, as they beat their wings

over us like a current lapping shore.

Somehow this makes sense

on the rocks that students inscribe 

with their lies and we lie upon.

 

“I luv u 4ever & ever”

smoothes the rock’s  scratches,

a protest for what case?  

On what page? Your fist?

Who punched them?   Your hand?

Who carved them?  Not an alien

stranger but a hand who knows us:

you chisel:

 

My flesh

                                          is skin,                 not rose-wine shaded quartz that scratches, 

                                                                                                      breaks, sinks, but always hides in an armored heart.  

                                                                                                                                                     It divides, but never dies.

  

I don’t think it will last, but nights turn into weeks into months, 

as I stay with him. Drawers fill with miniskirts, tanks, jeans, t-shirts, 

sweaters and parkas.  Turkish delights melt on my tongue, as detergent  

melts in laundry machines; he accepts a post-doctoral position and a lease 

on his life in America.  At night, he tells me the modern myths of the world

and the conspiracies that ballasted the myths.

 

 

A white car flashes a light into my mind 

and the eyes of a high driver, 

as grey men drove onto Geoffrey’s chest…

if a heart actually beat inside.  At times,

he claims he’s not really human.

 

 

He holds me mechanically,

telling me about the times he clutched a bottle 

instead of a calculator after lab, how quickly

the whiskey seeped into his system.

He received his doctorate in physics,

but Demetri delayed his main article

in the review process, so he never was published.

He claims that nanotechnology is a fake science.

 

 

 

With ice cream cones in hand, we collapse on

the railings and let the sun streak our bodies

on Navy Pier, where cruise ships depart 

for cocktail parties; a huge Ferris wheel

wheels above us, the spokes radiating out to little seats

where couples kiss above the city; under the rays,

I watch the ships and waves form a line

that extends in both directions without end.  

A wave forms from clumps of seaweed strung 

on fisheggs, schools of minnows, with plastic rings

 strangling their fins; the wave breaks 

off the English channel, ripping off the coast of Ireland,

and implodes against the white banister.  

You seem distant as your watch, eyes flecked tan

like soil of a distant shore.  I breathe in your ear;

you swat me away.

 

 

My blank stare meets his cryptic words.

 

 

I punch him gently.

 

 

Geoffrey grew up in the 1980s, 

when the IRA was waging a war

 for independence on the streets of London. 

 His public school had been in the line 

of attack.  One day a truck bearing a six

 ton bomb advanced towards his school,

but luckily, the bomb had a defect.

 

 

 

 

 

The United States government issues up to 65,000 H1B visas each year, allowing foreigners

in specialty occupations to be employed in America for up to three years. Excluded

from the limit are employees at university or non-profit research facilities and the 20,000 advanced degrees.  Even though the H-1B is a non-immigrant visa, it is recognized to have a dual

intent, meaning that an H1-B holder can have legal immigration intent while still holding 

the visa. In 2006, the quota was exhausted within a span of less than 2 months.  In 2007, the entire  

quota was reached before the end of the first day.  On April 8, 2008, it was announced that the entire quota for both visas was reached by the end of the first week.  A lottery was run for both visas.  

Flip a coin.  Who wants to leave their fate up to chance?

 

 

 

Blue swirls a typhoon in my eyes at Café Ambrosia, 

where you write application after application

 and I poem after poem.  Your upper lip curls, 

and your fingers strum the table before him

 as if you are plucking staccato. Sometimes, the void invades 

and you stare out.  Perhaps, you are imagining the wireless blackholes

 that fill with cover letters and resumes without responding.  

An alien job for an alien.   

Determined to find work in the United States, you 

attend job fair after job fair, interview after interview, 

                                           ranting about job prospects,

 first in Chicago, next in Alabama, finally in Boston.  

The interviews are identical, the same monotone voices

asking inane questions followed by the same intransigent answers.  

 

SCIENTIST:  Describe your thesis for me.

GEOFFREY:  To fulfill my dissertation at Northwestern

 University, I created an instrument to measure

 the electric current of graphene molecules

 and how closely they adhere to each other.

SCIENTIST:  Excellent.  A nanotechnology expert is exactly

 what we are looking for to round out 

our experimentation team.  You also went to Oxford, right?

GEOFFREY:  My masters is from Saint John’s College.

SCIENTIST:    You have a thick British accent.  What is your citizenship?

GEOFFREY:  I’ve been in the States since 2001 on a student visa.

SCIENTIST:   So, you’re a British citizen?

GEOFFREY:   I pay taxes here.

SCIENTIST:   And, you do not have dual citizenship?

GEOFFREY:   Not quite yet—

SCIENTIST:  Do you have a work visa or green card?

GEOFFREY:   All I need is the H1B.  

I have been here for five years performing cutting edge research—

SCIENTIST:    I understand.  It was so nice talking to you. 

Thank you so much for your time.

 

I don’t know what to say.  

You turn off all three of his computer monitors,

and drag into me like a cigarette; 

before going limp for a long time.  

 

I never ask about interviews after that.  

You say, “I don’t know” and stares off

into the silence that pelts us 

and causes our friction to heat up 

the space where answers once were.   

Our bodies bridge the vast distant words 

we can’t utter but both understood too well;

like an image taped to a mirror.  

 

This picture strips 

my soul away.  I tilt my head into the light 

without blinking; a black velvet gown clings

to my shoulders.  The standard

 blue background blurs behind me,

but for once, I don’t blend in.  

Blue-grey eyes flash back and forth

 with a glint that teases out answers 

to riddles. 

 

As light strikes past the breakers into the Arctic abyss,

 my eyes penetrate too deeply.   A shadow divides

 my face in two, but a smile stretches 

over it.  Dimples lengthen and criss-cross

 my jaw.  Strands of sun-streaked hair tumble 

down my shoulders, with the split

 ends landing on my graduation gown.   

 

My skin is so white 

it looks like it might chip.  

Over claret cheeks, Porcelain

 skin lies as translucent as ice.  

Moles are not permitted to sully

 a pale face. Freckles are airbrushed 

off my nose, which is slightly

too angular for my oval face. I’ve chiseled

my collar bone from my neck, where it juts

into my shoulder blades 

and carves into my throat.   

A pendant dangles down 

from a gold chain around

 my neck. It is emerald, 

like my birthstone, a gift from 

my grandfather on my birthday. 

Just as I meet the camera eye to eye,

 in a dare for time to pass, 

the chain breaks and slips                                                                   past the photo’s edge. 

He stares at our reflection in the mirror; eyes furrowed,  

as if he is memorizing some complex equation.

The way we fit together: as the moment slips away.  

 

 

The el pulses me awake like steam seeps into my bed sheets, beneath my stained white 

down quilt.  I awaken in the Northern Chicago black (or is it Evanston?) 

and Polaris is hiding under the blind of clouds—clumps of gray—and the stars are 

sprinkling down snow, shining like white crystals in an ice sky.  If Lake 

Michigan thickens over, will school open tomorrow?  Or will the kids slick over the 

bump between the lake and those cobblestone buildings with sleds of 

books and dining hall trays?  Where you and I slicked over the waves last summer?  By 

waves, I clarify:  demeaning ripples, droplets, kisses of fresh water.   

Then, you decided we should drill our initials into the rocks—the grass frozen with 

dandelions and red soldier ants stinging you with mosquito bites.  We 

never did that, though—just as we would never drill our initials into the marble body of 

the Washington Monument, erect in the sky like that icicle that weather 

forecasters predicted but never came to those blue skies and occasional “Indian winters”; 

those days where girls wore miniskirts and swung on swings in February 

burning sun.    I like to experiment, experience, feel the moon ring my skin with moles.  The moon’s 

craters are moles, casting a shadow like an eclipse over your bed.  My body forms a

a crater in the bed, which you fill with down-skin.  Snow frosts our limbs together, freezing white chests 

and smoke furls of golden hair.  Skyscrapers of lips rise, their lights still lit; their 

dark reflections trace the white.  Snow sculptures scraping the sun. Eyes blink like snowdrops; irises of 

ice and pupils of coal, fire frosted.

 

 

I pour the milk in before the tea swirls brown.

You slump down, in a growl of stares.

 

The Visa didn’t come through.

 

It’s less than a month before graduation. 

Two weeks after the H1B deadline.  

On April 8, all the visa quotas were filled. 

 Six months before the stock market crash of 2008.   

They said the stockmarket would never crash again.  

There would never be ten percent unemployment.   

They said history only repeated itself

when America succeeded.  Not when it failed.

 

 

This is a country for illegal immigrants.

 The Mexicans circle around 

his parking lot at night.    

Their hands grease over scrap metal 

and tote it into their pick-up trucks into the recyclery into raw steel.   

Recycling the labor; recycling metal.  It fits.  

What puts you above them, 

a pale skin, money, your elitism?  

 is just a vain memory that shields you

                   from reality.   You are an invisible man here. 

You may have lived in their cathedral spires,

but never achieved their height; 

now you’re plummeting towards the ground 

without anything to break the fall.  

Why can’t you recycle your science, math, and ideas?

 

The desire to survive in America is just as strong.   

The Atlantic breaks Europe from America, 

just as the fence does.     

 

 

 You don’t admit nothing but the facts,

 spinning numbers into excuses, boxes, tape,

as your sorry excuse for a return to the motherland.  

 I scrape out of your embrace.

 

 

An incubus fleets by—

A knock at the door

opens to reveal a suited INS man

demanding to see your Visa, 

your right to stay in the States for five years. 

You tentatively hands it over to the clank 

of metal-on-metal as hand-cuffs slap his wrists—

 

 date— Then, I couldn’t go back 

 particles across—I hate when he mimics Einstein.

 

You avoid my eyes.

 

Silence.  Still.  I leave;

into the bedroom 

and cover myself in sheets

till I lose sight of all light.

He comes in and indents the sheets,

but my stare dares him away.

He strokes me, until I am raw;

 

my eyes trail him.  

If I blink, he’ll be gone

 if he were ever here.  

 

 

You have yet another scheme in mind

when you insist we go away over Memorial Day Weekend.

 

 In Lake Michigan, there are isle cays completely

 removed from time only reached by spurious 

ferries that shuttle in between.  Far off in the wind, 

an island comes into being,

black steeples stretching 

against the white sails 

of schooners in a harbor punctuated

 by wooden docks and skeletal 

whiteoaks just beginning to sprout leaves.  

Red buggies trot up roads of white shells, 

which match the whitewashed edifices, 

to the dun walls of a Civil War fort. 

 Automobiles were banned 

in the late nineteenth century, 

after a streetcar startled 

a horse and overturned 

the carriage.  Without motors, 

I can hear footsteps from all over,;

 every twitch of a twig jumps out at me.  

The harbor reminds me of a film set, 

where the past is recreated in copious detail.  

 

You set up your tripod here. 

 I pop my hip, as your camera flashes.  

 you point at a wigwam, where feathers are strung 

to the opening of the first Indian mission.  

The quiet assaults me in its eccentricity.  

 

 

I peer into the leather wigwam: 

a dirt fireplace, a woven blanket, 

a fishing rod.  That’s all he needs

 to live off the land.  

 

 

A pair of Clydesdales pulls a bright yellow streetsweeper

 by the woods; its brush wipes away 

and its engine whirrs at a steady walk.  

There is a time to break with the past 

and push forwards.  I grit my teeth.

 

Turning my back on the camera, 

I wrap my leather coat about me.  

The moment is ruined.  

Your camera clicks shut. 

 

 

The next day we finally abandon

 our coats and head 

towards the Sleeping Bear dunes.  

 

As we approach, 

a mountain of shifting sand rises to the sky, 

hiding the lake behind its layers of grass and grains.   

Paths of footsteps criss-cross warm sand;  

I can’t see a solid way up. You haul us up; 

the silicon specks whistle with every step.   

 

 

The sand shifts under our feet 

as I reach the precipice.  Here,

 the horizon doesn’t have a steady line. 

 Looking out, we can see past cars

 and tar roads to cerulean lake. 

 Behind us, a skinny canal courses

 towards purple mountains blurring 

into the sky.  Ghost weeds whistle 

in variegated patches as the sunset sets in. 

 I pluck a reed and whistle through it. 

 

 

It’s a desert up here.  You’d never

 find a place this desolate in England.

 

                                                     You push me, 

                                                     and I roll down

                                                      the dune, sand 

                                                     braising me.  

                                                     You follow me 

                                                     down to a beach, 

                                                     where a tidal 

                                                     pool divides

                                                     the strand of 

                                                     beach between ripples 

                                                     of freshwater.  We lie 

                                                     down, surrounded

                                                      by lake, as the light 

                                                     goes down to the sea,

                                                      and your lips taste of salt.  

                                                     When you stroke me, 

                                                     I pinch you.  

                                                     Ow.  No pinching.

                                                     I giggle.  

                                                     Your hands make manacles

                                                      around my wrists.  

                                                                                               Oh, Lisa.

                                                     You breath deep in my ear; 

                                                     I hear the basin breathe in

                                                     and out.  The water

                                                      quivers silverblue, 

                                                     as it passes over my legs 

                                                     and penetrates the sand.  

                                                     Maybe, I shouldn’t go.  

 

 

The light breaks off suddenly in warning.

 The water is dangerously pale, as if I might forget 

myself and blend into the sky.   

 

                                                                              Will you?

                                                                         Will you marry—?

                                                                      I untangle myself in disgust.

 

Rejection turns his cheek ruddy.  

 

I spit.  

                  Why?

 

His eyes are black like bullets;

I blanche from their intensity.   

 

I don’t say:

monasteries, and royal catacombs.  I look down.  

 

 

                                                                         The blackness washes over us 

                                                                         like the tides slapping 

                                                                         down the surface

                                                                          until it was barely there.

 

The car ride home is like waking

 from a dream. 

 Geoffrey and I barely speak,

except in growls.

 

 

You shrug.  

The engine drowns

 out all dialogue.  

 

 

I still stay in his doomed apartment, ignoring the boxes and tape—it takes him a week 

to dismantle his life and fling the pieces into boxes 

and seal the boxes too tightly with tape.  

 

 

Perhaps, he is an alien, 

as he is one in this country,  and soon, the spaceship will shuttle

 him back to the antiquity he fears.   At university,  

he taught himself to doff religion in place of ideas

and the ideas led him into a wormhole.  

 

 

Except, lie here in the dark,

just a common void without reason.  

Male shame filters in the moonlight. 

 He shuts the blinds and listens

 to the crickets contesting

 outside his window.  Nothing has a reason; 

reason has nothing but crickets that fall dead in the night.

 

If there is no reason beyond red lines emending, 

you see the world in black and white and red.  

As bureaucracy imbibes a life of its own,

you can scream at the pawns, but not the source,

which hides back far-far-away.  The monster evolved itself, 

and forms become a label and the shackles 

by which we bind boys to labor 

or ship them back to the prison camps 

in their former countries.  

There is no rhyme and reason; 

the bureaucrat does not take logos or pathos

 or facts or deduction, just forms, forms, forms. 

Black prints on white paper.  Red 

outlines and yellow highlighting

 draw punishment or reprieve. 

 

 There is no bootsole before the kick; 

just the bloodhounds trailing your trail 

out of the country.  Hear the door slam  behind you;

 the hounds bay; footsteps fade away forever.

 For ever.

 

You observe Chicago with cold calculation,

as if you’ve already left the city behind.  

Randolph is no longer lined with billboards 

advertising the latest shows while a million glass lights

break into the streets; rather it ends by Piccadilly Circle.  

The Second City satirically bows down to the West End, 

as you improvise: is that Big Ben in the horizon?  

No, the Sears Tower rises to heights far beyond 

what the London Tower would ever aspire.   

The Chicago canal once dyed green winds 

by the huge Ferris wheel whose spokes branch

 into eye-shaped capsules.   Bridges form across streets,

 by the Macys and the Harrods, shoppers in gray pose, 

quiet and sedated.  In a cruel exaction, you know 

tomorrow will come too soon.  Chicago slips away 

into the crowded mass of painted ladies and their gentlemen callers,

 as if it were never there.

 

There’s nothing to do now 

but take a seat, say your lines with poise, 

and watch, as the play unfolds. 

The curtain opens on you, the British dummy.

 

That night I don’t know how

to say good-bye on the sand.

I can’t believe that time is a bullet

shooting by so fast; tonight,  

gravity defies me.

 

 

Foam outlines broken continents 

and too wide oceans in the sandmud.  

I bury my head into your armpit, 

as the water brushes past us, 

onto us, into us.  

 

Your arms strain around me.  

Then, gravity breaks, 

and tears break, 

and I think I can’t control it.

 But, I do, because I must. 

 

You hold up a paper.  

It’s an H1B1 form that’s been scribbled over.  

 

You rip the papers 

in half and quarters and eighths, 

until the paper shreds in fistfuls.  

The pages drift and seep

till the weight of the water drags

 them down. My toes curl

 around the compressed slag,

 as ink bleeds into the water.  

 

I want to scream

 I don’t.  

 

As the light shimmers and fades

 into a sandbank, where water gently pulses, 

our bodies streamline and split.   

We sleep by the lake.  

When I wake all I see is stale water.  

Your plane took off hours ago.  

I faintly remember your leaving: 

the headlights shades the strand; 

a car horn blows; lips splay.  

                  I love you.

                  Then, still; 

bruised waves rush past; 

the water doesn’t permit any tears. 

I imagine I see you over a crest, 

but the small waves wash you away. 

A fence seems to form in the cobalt deep

 to block out all possibilities.  

It is the same tide; only a fence divides it;

only a fence guards it.  How quick it is, 

I think, that one is effaced.  

I am just as invisible to him, as he is to me. 

Looking through the lake,

a speck of eyewhite visa 

slips under the water and stares back me,