Bronze Medal
Josie Emmons Turner
When your body was as straight as Ocean Avenue, you dove
in the Pacific, after morning fog lifted, after dolphins
traversed south, after pelicans finished breakfast. Your
sexy, lean chest, never sunburned, stronger than crosscurrents
that consume us now, dragging us under, taking us
south (if only to Big Sur). Your spine drips and bends,
a crumbling corkscrew, a tortured skeleton, a war-torn
southeast Asian souvenir, that present you did not intend
to ever unwrap, did not want to ever feel, consume
when you were standing on her deck in your flak jacket,
hands on hips, shouting orders that someone else had shouted
you, holding binoculars, spotting targets shrouded in smoke.
Sometimes the shrapnel embedded into a sailor’s
body is not shot or metal, bullets, or iron but remnants
of chemicals oozing out of an aging nervous system,
destroying perfection, and a beautiful bronze medal mind.
We’ll not swim at Carmel Beach again and that doesn’t matter
because the water is now too cold, and I never liked
seaweed and salt. For now, we read, eat chocolate, drink
red wine, light fires, forget therapists, and for now, it is, now.
Josie Emmons Turner was Tacoma Poet Laureate 2011-2013. Her work was recently published in High Shelf Press and has been published in California Quarterly, Floating Bridge Review, Creative Colloquy, and Backstreet Quarterly. She earned her MFA at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Josie, her husband, William Turner, and dog Charlie, live with on an estuary in Gig Harbor, Washington where they listen to seal barking in the morning and are studying the language of nature and wildlife.
“Bronze Medal” was inspired by the poet’s husband’s wartime experience and their intimate love of, and relationship with Carmel, California. William Turner is a former USN Lieutenant and the recipient of two Bronze Stars for his service in Vietnam 1965-1968. As a Gunnery Officer, he oversaw round the clock expending of over 6200 rounds in December-January 1967-68. His service, of which he is enormously proud, exposed him to Agent Orange and now, Turner, in his later years, continues to give back to his country through the cruel diagnosis of Agent Orange-related Parkinson’s.