Snapping Turtle

by Jeff Hoffman 

FADE IN:

On a SHED, painted black. We move inside to find a pail of green blood
and a SNAPPING TURTLE, twisting on a hook.

(One of my first memories, and most of it muddled. Likely, the black shed
a nude and rotting wood. The blood-bright green not green at all.)

                                                                                                               CUT TO:

 

My mother’s DOWN-TUFTED SCALP fluffed in shampoo. 

No more failed chemo, no more forever: Breathe, follicles, breathe. 

(Those last few months before my mother died, I’d wash her hair at the kitchen sink.
I’d either scrub too hard and hurt her, or she’d slap her hand on the counter
and tell me I wasn’t scrubbing hard enough.)

                                                                                                               CUT TO:

 

COMFORT in his lollipop heaven. He pretties himself, futzes, startles
at a sound from far below. An animal’s YELP.

Comfort flits to his sugar-glazed window. Sees a BOY (16) in a
kitchen. Below the boy, something twitching in the sink. Comfort
watches; Comfort waits.

As we move toward the boy…

                                                                                                               CUT TO:

 

…the boy grows younger; the scalp becomes again the turtle’s shell. 

The turtle’s head: slumped. Its legs: slumped. Its blood: drained. Its belly: waiting.

(Those last few months before my mother died, I imagined she was already dead. On my back, wing nubs festered — little boils that dreamed of the sky. I made my plans. I ate a compass for breakfast, a road atlas for lunch. I unzipped my boy suit and let it bleed in the snow. My hollow bones walked on without me.) 

 

CUT TO BLACK.

 

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Jeff Hoffman’s first book of poems, Journal of American Foreign Policy, won the New Issues Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the California Book Award in poetry. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Recent and forthcoming work at Barrelhouse, Hobart, Smartish Pace, and Terrain.org. He has been a Stegner Fellow, a Michener Fellow, and a Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellow with Paramount Pictures.