Competition

Second Prize

Perpetual Sound
by Clara Fannjiang
Davis, California, USA

the wise misters of our time
or even their sons, their half-head
coddlings who attend
bighead academies with names of
sour shaving cream, they ask

big things like what if, suppose
let us say, see there's this
big tree and it falls
and see, suppose there's no one in its

respective forest (firstly,we assume that
every entity of nature must - of course! - be defined
by some syllabic fetter or another,
erth air riv er fi ya
fish eez swim in sea

so ti ya)
does it make a sound?
[exclamation mark here]
give me thy sugar-spun heart
and i will give thee a lump of coal.

*

william once spent twenty-four entire seconds mushing a beetle
with his chair leg, stamping a discursive essay of bruise-colored juice
and bitty crackled legs across the bulletin of time,
the fleckly linoleum. it's nicer to think of the phrase, he did it for a damsel
in distress, see of course karis thought bugs were yucko what is
thato, but william doesn't have swirly gold locks to flounce his nonexistent
bravado and chivalry. he took his sweet honey love time,
grating his stiff little chair across the pitless floor
like it was a piece of finely aged mozzarella with the curves
of a finely-aged woman.

a crowd was in the stiff little room
where william committed his stiff little murder.

*

it made no sound. within twenty-four hours the jani-tore up
the speckled linoleum, and the beetle was no longer
a that to is whato. someone pulled out a baton and did not hallmark the
time or day across the fluorescent walls, and hurried us along,
snappy black funeral heels and all, into schubert's unfinished.
it made no sound.

*

a draught of ennui can leave us stoned
in perpetual motion
or perfectual stopping. old franz
was cursed with a roundhouse of
three-in-a-bar, and thus fell his

composing quill the way one
falls a big tree in a great
for est. his perpetual sound creates an asylum
for a well-forgotten beetle,
as it does for

the lost-of-mind, the washingtons
and einsteins who burned into ashes
that fell away with the clear
wind. there is no salvation for
a wronged beetle, there is no justice

for a poet who ridicules
wise men. were the weight of the world
balanced upon the undeath of
schrödinger's cat, would the death of
william's beetle be its accomplice? suppose

there was a demagogue
in our midst; would she call upon his beetle
for a crownless dinner? and say his beetle bore a spot
upon its back the color of lovelorn
emerald. it would smite a heart

of cold lust, the sheen of a monster
wringing a lagoon. the stones would rise
and join the paper cranes,
the coals i gave you would
feed your silent tongue.