1st prize: $5,000   -   Deadline: August 1st

Chris Green

MY BROTHER BURIES HIS DOG

He moves furniture for a living, oversized bureaus and beds for the rich. He is big now and dumb with love that animals sense--cats, dogs, squirrels, birds, his pygmy turtles and rabbits, tree frogs--they all take him in, nuzzle his childhood scars, forgive his bad jobs and girlfriends. The middle child who grew up telling us all to fuck off--now a grown man, calls me crying, Why my puppy! (His Great Dane is dead.) He sobs, and I remember how we beat him--Mom, Dad, nuns, coaches, teachers--I know I did. And like animals before a storm, he has premonitions--this time a dream of me crying over Nina's corpse. He says, I want you to think about that. He says it because I'm the godless eldest son who knows everything. So we carry his huge dead dog from the vet to his truck to his backyard. He digs a hole all day then lays her black body in the dark. Weeping, he seals her in with a last block of sod, and between the kiddy pool and the garage we embrace. He whispers, I love you. And in that moment I knew what animals know.

--from RATTLE #21 - Summer 2004

Review by David Lee Garrison (email)

A visceral urgency pervades this book. It is about handling dead body parts and imagining yourself as a cadaver, hearing coins jingle in your father's pocket while standing by his grave, using a washing machine as a vibrator, seeking sexual gratification with a vacuum cleaner, making love in the kitchen and hoping the kids will think you are washing dishes. Comic or tragic, every poem in this book hits you hard in the gut.
 
It has three sections. In the first, The Smell of Death, the poet recalls his childhood as the son of a surgeon, his own work in a morgue, and his father's death. The second, The Weight of Desire, starts with a funny poem about budding adolescent sexuality, goes on to bare all in an unflinchingly honest exploration of the human need for love and sex, and ends with a poem about cicadas who wait seventeen years to mate and die "doing what they love." The last section, Moving On, deals with marriage, children, divorce, remarriage, and intimations of mortality.

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