The Coroner Is a Crooner: A Queer Exquisite Corpse by Steven Cordova

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The coroner is a crooner

who sings the lyrics of the dead written on the flesh of instruments now broken.

Laid out in a row along a raucous river:

the books and pencils that the four-eyed scholars left behind.

No one heard the last bell because it was summer

so there was no one to scatter

the ashes left after the brilliant flames we were

meant to bury and forget with our lost, wild

present tense, and by that I mean tense

pretenses. Why don’t you get off your high horse and

admit that restraints are another form of freedom

and freedom a peculiarly addictive form of restraint,

a kind of atomic quiescence handcuffed to dreams?  

Fires bright lightning pulses, un-stills the ground underground

and surges skyward, through the calloused and crusted souls

while an optimistic owl, perched on an olive branch, hoots over the silver crash.

Fluorescent hospital lamps scope and pinch the bloated beast’s ass. 

We pluck from our laid bodies one more soft-core heart to place against the tunnel of her 

    ear. Here:

though this siren was never lashed to any captain or mast, only constellations.

It was always bluer beyond the walls—

lapis veined with cirrus, bird, and contrail,

a peacock ready to fan the flames of next, next, next:

Didn’t you love me, once?

Or maybe I broke your heart in a past life, 

broken then sewn into my thigh where it might lie unowned until I am sworn to or known  

like some demonic talisman. I love whatever works its way into my genome

to undo me. To build in my place a monument. What kind of love unreels

like a half-finished movie, leaving the leading lady in waiting for

her face never held by that perfect light against the curated clouds.

Ah, exquisite corpse skins coexist as queer kinship,

scripting more enthusiasts than mere egoists, yeah?

as if the sun burnt on their own shoulders the thrill of blaze—

the starving birds of paradise and nightmare, gull and crow,

the river quiet; the river a broken tongue. If this boat was a language, 

it would be on fire, incinerating the river and scorching the shores.

Where once we sat down and wept, each for their own Zion, their own Avalon,

we had lost the places but not their names, forgotten the words to the songs, 

     but not the memory of song.

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Artist Statement:

When I first conceived of curating a queer exquisite corpse, I naively hoped to include as many poets as possible. But soon enough, much as I was enjoying the project, much as I was humbled by the number of poets who responded to my emails and DMs, I began to tire. Creating an exquisite corpse electronically is a slow, exacting process. Also, on an aesthetic level, I began to sense two things: one, that the leaps in imagery and thought processes from line to line can only persist for so long before the reader begins to tire; and two, that a line contributed by Robin Becker echoes the imagery of the exquisite corpse’s opening lines with their evocations of song and song lyrics. Given these aesthetic considerations, I decided to end the poem at 40 lines. It seemed like a nice even number besides. The idea to curate an exquisite corpse came to me after seeing a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art entitled Surrealism Beyond Borders. The exquisite corpses exhibited there were drawings as opposed to written pieces.

Contributors:

Steven Cordova, Walter Holland, Kevin Hinkle, Michael Bondhus, Jendi Reiter, Jameson Fitzpatrick, Jason Schneiderman, Joan Larkin, Elaine Sexton, Timothy Liu, Francisco Aragón, Joy Ladin, Neil de la Flor, Beatrix Gates, Jubi Arriola-Headley, Regie Cabico, Peter Covino, John Bonanni, Cyrus Cassells, Janlori Goldman, Daniel W.K. Lee, Richie Hofman, Kathy Fagan, Raymond Luczak, Jeff Walt, Michael Montlack, Kazim Ali, Maggie Millner, Aldo Amparán, Lesléa Newman, Miller Oberman, Urayoán Noel, Chip Livingston, Amanda Hawkins, Bryan Borland, Seth Pennington, Julie Enszer, Michael Broder, and Robin Becker.

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Steven Cordova’s full-length collection of poetry, Long Distance, was published by Bilingual Review Press in 2010. His poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Journal, New Orleans Review, Notre Dame Review, Los Angeles Review and Pleaides. From San Antonio, TX, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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17 June 2024