Tales happen—
even storied autobiographies
change, rendered endless.
Don’t ask recollections
to offer forgiveness:
take respite, exist safely,
pass away, sing songs into nothing,
go; be, and release,
even forget overcoming,
overcome tomorrow.
By Heidi Turner
Go and gather all the stories
together until they realign
into a new mythology
the explanations will configure
until we are forgotten in specifics
and stand in as neo-gods
and even newer traumas come
to tear our tales apart.
By Heidi Turner
“Did you sound the alarm?”
In my ears, a wailing and a cry—
my body exhausted and dragging
itself through the motions
of preventing the end of the world,
and you are standing on deck
eyes a’shining,
you reach for my hand
while I reach for the ropes,
“My love, do you hear it?
Do you too hear the siren?”
By Heidi Turner
Sometimes the meaning we’re seeking
isn’t meant for us,
it exists, independent, a North Star
in the conscience,
that defies explanation and resists
the words we give it,
sometimes, our own lives bend
under weights of mythic proportions,
sometimes we, individually,
are both the Sword and the Stone.
By Heidi Turner
What we call Fate is probably chance
working backward,
time itself spinning around the cogs
to align the stars and planets,
to re-arrange the tides to match
the exact Fortune the lives we’ve led
demanded, and if it’s so,
then the universe was made to carry
the blame of its own entropy,
the hand that stops
its own body’s bleeding.
By Heidi Turner
Every breath of wind
and every exhalation
is a memory of life
as it begun,
just as the dust settled
on old coffee cups is
the tale of our ending,
as every abandoned
doorway reminds us
of the garden.
By Heidi Turner
I touch a thousand objects
that root me to the world,
the ice cream scoop, my first guitar,
a pair of shoes like others I’ve had,
and it’s in those tethered contacts
that I feel the anchor extend
out and upward into the stars;
briefly, I am centered in the universe.
By Heidi Turner
I can’t promise I won’t haunt you
in the life you lead after me,
just as your imagined remarks sometimes
almost audibly strike what would be a chord
but for my out-of-tune heartstrings;
a part of me is still listening on the stairs,
just as a part of you is waiting for me there,
can we leave the places we were re-born?
I don’t make promises for ghosts anymore,
won’t pledge fealty to that cheat Memory,
but I swear to you in the three dot spaces
between us, I will never touch your soul anew.
By Heidi Turner
I wonder if I once died
a martyr under the trees,
tied alive like a witch,
stabbed, or left to ash,
was I brave and did I wait
until my fear fell
under the rule of my soul,
transformed into its truest essence?
If it’s all true, then the past
behind the sliding doors
would have me born again…
when did I grow a coward’s heart?
By Heidi Turner
I am your Jericho,
fallen walls
and a scarlet cord,
hanging by a thread
with hope in fragments
around the gates;
I waited so long for you
to speak
and I ran into your story,
disappeared, left a warning:
don’t rebuild here;
your voice destroyed the future too.
By Heidi Turner
After playing in ironic humor
and the blindfold darkness of despair,
I sought after armor, wore a sword
and kept my heart locked behind its
catastrophic walls,
I even tried philosophy and noticed
questions’ comfort wears away once
the questioner is gone, and I am no
judge of myself.
In the end, I found that kindness
is the only safety for the soul.
By Heidi Turner
I moved at angles
across a perpendicular landscape
until you introduced me to the sea,
and I became free atop the rigging,
tying up stories and memories
as we traversed
along unpredictable waves,
and now, I am ashore,
hammer in hand and sewing sails,
designing a standard I still haven’t seen,
I was almost a knight; now I’m a pirate,
and I want to sail my ship.
By Heidi Turner
The trick is to close your eyes
(just a little) so that the patterns
seem invisible, to un-train your ears
and to forget the tunes
you’ve heard before,
so that when the song reaches
its crescendo, you will have no questions;
the end will fit into the surprising inevitable,
the themes exposed in their pianissimo,
handshakes that can double as goodbyes.
By Heidi Turner
If there are no more songs,
will I have you?
Will you listen to my story if my voice is hoarse;
will you hold my body
when the smell of blood and smoke is still clinging?
If there are no more melodies,
no words for what we’ve seen,
will you hold me in the snow
until sunrise, or until we fall asleep?
This is the song I hum on the wind,
and I pray that someone is listening…
remember us who sing no songs,
tell our stories, even after your victory.
By Heidi Turner
In theory, we begin to leave ghosts
the moment a self of ours is shed
from the surface and becomes the self
that exists in the past,
and we occasionally see the selves again.
A self of mine is nursing a bloody lip
at the bottom of a slide,
while I-Who-Was is practicing basketball
at my grandmother’s,
(as though the hoop is still there),
and in fact, I am certain I have left many
of me behind, in every place that held me,
because I bumped into my own ghost,
(in broad daylight, no less), vainly searching
Hot Topic for a shirt in our former size.
By Heidi Turner
Little lavender blooms
that line the edges of your consciousness
and frame your fears in quiet rustles,
the waves lapping on the sand,
water brushing up to remind you
to breathe in and release, an internal ocean,
and, of course, the bright haze of summer
that matches the flush of your cheeks,
clouds hovering over a sunset that will soon begin.
By Heidi Turner
A crown pushed down on my head,
my own sword pressed my shoulders,
“Kiss me, your Majesty,”
How could I but obey?
I cross myself when I see her stretched
across our bed, with the smell of a friend
clinging to her hair, my fingerprints
reflecting on the gold she wears,
and I remember it,
even from the secret berm
where I await; they say I will return,
and when I do, I will feel her hands
resting on my hair again,
the only crown I ever wanted to wear.
By Heidi Turner
I hope I forget you in the peaceful way,
no longer remembering the habits of yours
that bubble up in you-like situations,
that I forget the way you sounded
before you started talking like this,
and I hope you know that visceral
feeling of smelling a passing smell
has faded into a photograph of a memory,
almost all the venom gone.
By Heidi Turner
I’ve written the same song
seventeen times;
every version features
different timelines
until they reach the Center,
the point of it all,
the climax
and parasitic denouement,
every one of them ends,
and all seventeen of me
that lived inside those measures
waits for an irrevocable coda.
By Heidi Turner
“It’s only death,”
the step between destiny
and forgery,
between molding a story
out of massacre,
and in the breath exchanged
when lips separate,
from each other,
and from each other’s.
By Heidi Turner
