Michael Allen Turner

Michael Allen Turner has an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Newark. His poems appear in Barrelhouse and he is an editor of Growler, an online publication, which reviews first books of poetry and fiction, where his reviews also appear.

► Michael's book is available for printing. See below and click on the PDF icon.

Microchap		Poems
Bad Girl Gone Badder
Click title to download microchap Michael Allen Turner © 2010 •		Little Red’s Basket of Eyes, Necklace of Bones She collects eyes, especially wolves’ eyes where domestication curdles on the cornea and pupils flood with kill light. Each pair leads to more bones dangling off her punctured neck. She rattles hollow, while the restless reeds succumb in her basket’s herringbone pattern, so forget their whispering while holding water’s edge, now they lull pupils to pinpoints. She’s chicken wire grown into bark—made to look purposefully impossible. Several skeletons burrow under her skin to try to curl onto her brainstem. They alter her breathing, increase salivation, make her lonely for the pack, mix the tale with digestive juices—the ladle coming down like an answer
		Little Red Goes In For Elective Surgery We can never kiss. You with a blue square that covers your mouth, and me, just anatomy. The sky is held with four strings and this turns my knees inside out. I wouldn't be able to understand your coffee breath, the way you leave incisions on the table, tiny yawns which need to be pinned. You have the drip, and I the beep, another representation. — and there I go What have you done with the crowd's chorus, that small cloud of outliers that I still haven't gotten over? Can you, for once, bring the dirt to me
		*Little Red Embraces Militant Feminism* It gave up its water to hold water. This basket of dried reeds held worn - to her head as she travels the well path trodden by many women. This is the greatest palimpsest effect, a sentence laid out from their doors in well. One woman's footprints - to the seeped alone would not be enough to bevel and harden the earth, she would know, too well, the stomped out story. On the path there's a cacophony of sentences spliced together and just one woman hoping her basket springs a leak to muddy the stew. Or she hopes for a river, one that rages with the memory of its birth, the scent locked away for some season to come and release it. She will not boil the water this time, she will come home as all things come home, with the desire to create or destroy.
		Little Red Therered to the Bed She makes the raft to handle the to and fro. There are padlocks in her brain: if you bring your eye to the keyhole you will see sparkling water, industrial blue, women in bikinis who dip their legs in and rub lotion on their arms to reveal the secret. She remembers what it was to love herself, to piss in the pot, her leg tethered to her husband's bed post. She wiped so gingerly, so tenderly and ignored the tugs as she beckoned the disease closer and closer waving some wand in the air.
		Little Red Considers Symmetry Birds flit forth, half coursing with color - one the other white as Little Red’s dream bubble where they pass presenting stiff plumage, asking for horse hair to nest. Only one eye is needed for flight, but the birds expose halves and draw - their white — the violence towards the head pencil circling for symmetry, where the other eye should be.

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