Tobias Wray
Two POEMS
Turing Tested
Such queer things, elegies.
All shapes have a beginning,
Turing supposed: morphogenesis. It is this initial
spinning that describes us, our original moan,
developed from spiral and signal—notion of a physical soul.
Popcorn strung on a string. We are heroic machines,
pushed out from DNA center, designed
to pull back curtains from their windows,
to make trains go, to sing.
<>
Wars hold strange words in their teeth
in the submarine dark of the deep.
For every eye, a lid. For every war,
a shiny, new machine.
<>
Seagulls dipped behind government
buildings like blips on radar screens. Slow, unsteady.
He first met Murray outside the Regal Cinema.
Murray just out of Monkey Business,
starring Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers,
Marilyn Monroe. Turing saw
The Snows of Kilimanjaro,
and in fact, it did snow. It snowed and snowed.
They had afternoon tea the next day,
leaves left drifting into their knots, water darkening.
<>
Before there were Homosexuals
there were Contrary Sensations.
The undeserving streets awaited
their soldiers, saviors.
A genius of solution, he imagined
a test for whether man or man-thing.
Genius, for all its solitude,
means a fathering force,
attendant spirit.
He was at work on mathematical biology
to grip at the root of all things,
when he fell for a hustler named Murray.
Loved him, maybe.
Or, if not love, perhaps
they exchanged some other code.
Nothing made should be lost,
one can hear him explain.
<>
Gross indecency. Section 11.
Convicted in March, a month
of caws and echoes.
Bad jokes can kill, he must have laughed
from his cell. Robed men in wigs offered judgement:
selection. He chose chemical castration
over prison. A flood
through narrow cracks.
The pressure of walls inside veins.
<>
Injections of stilboestrol,
a hormone treatment designed
to produce impotence. The give
of the skin on the arm as the needle
slides in: No doubt I will return
a different man, he said.
<>
The treatments caused his breasts
and ambiguity to grow.
All things change: another law
to weaponize.
He was known to love Snow White, loved
the novelty of animation, dream-haze
come to life. A woman lifts her arm to singing branches,
pure song: what integration, what connection.
He was in awe of novelty, where
it might go. His eyes wide
as a queen dipped her apple in
its brutal brew. In the mirror,
he saw all the world
one inevitable machine.
<>
Those wind-swept government halls,
the appeal of uniforms, corridors,
secrets tucked into pockets with pens
and keys. Small words, like launch,
slender as their fingers over the keys.
Turing broke every code,
unexploded a thousand ships.
Then, guilty of being
decrypted. Faulted for lying on a couch
after afternoon tea. For plucking something
from the string and holding it in his mouth
for an hour after tea. The exhaustive brevity
of opinion. Their disgusted eyes squinted
unassailable decision. Of course,
he understood the limits of what they could see.
<>
Stiff from cyanide, waiting for nothing,
his housekeeper found him. As scientists are wont,
he was a man of habit. Evenings, he would have an apple
before sleep. One bite and all your dreams . . .
It was not unusual for it to be found at his bedside,
half-eaten, his housekeeper said. See?
Teeth mark windows to the core:
the dark wink of what can only be a seed.
Queen Samson
BUT THE WORLD NEEDS ITS FIRES, ITS CITIES OF SHAME —RANDALL MANN
And in your city, I held my feast.
And in your city, I gathered men great in number.
I tore ladders from the walls in your city.
And in your city, I full-force bested.
I tore the walls from their sitting.
And in your city, I held my feast.
And in your city, I took men to my chamber.
And in their city, I full-force bested.
I rent their clothes, I broke their walls, and in your city
I cast fire where it needed to burn,
and in your city, I howled my name in reverse.
The people of this city have familiar faces.
Tragedy, anciently composed:
the gravest, most moral and profitable.
For the love of building, of burning.
And in your city, feasts
and in your city, great in slumber
and in your city,
walls, once broken, recall
endlessly their powers
of division revisited. To hold
this thing we care about
we name it with a myth.
Tobias Wray’s debut poetry collection, No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man, won the Lighthouse Poetry Prize (CSU, 2021). His work also appears in Bellingham Review, The Georgia Review, Hunger Mountain, and Meridian. He directs the University of Idaho’s Creative Writing Programs, where he lives on the Palouse with his hiking partner, Andy. Follow his work at www.tobiaswray.com.