2024 Portrait Prize Second Place Winner: “Jared” by Reed Turchi
We’ve got another winning poem on deck! Reed Turchi is the Second Place Winner of Frontier Poetry‘s 2024 Portrait Prize Contest. Read their nonjudgemental & affecting poem, “Jared,” selected by our team.
Here we have a piece that assumes nothing of “Jared” — a complex, native Arkansanian who loves music and the routine calm of his cigarette (to say the absolute least of him). Despite the poignant content set aflame by Turchi’s quiet command of his craft, Turchi’s “work” in this poem is one of humanizing observation rather than judgment. Touching on the strange yet inextricable relationship between the quotidian, the jarring, and the voyeuristic nature of the phones we hold that capture both.
Jared
begins to crack, but does not give. This was Midtown,
Memphis, & back then night sessions went til 6am,
day-shifts starting up at seven, so after long nights
in the studio we’d step out to a low-red sun & watch
pairs of cargo planes descend. “Jared”
was the night-guy’s name —paid minimally
to make sure the fire door didn’t get propped
open, to fan out smoke from the control rooms,
to spray fresh beginnings in the bathroom.
Mid 30’s, a baby face that camouflaged
the life he’d left in Arkansas. I mostly passed
him in the hall, but he’d call out when he’d
learned some new nuance of guitar —
would say hey, check this out, & demonstrate
how re-voicing chords of “Ring of Fire”
could lead to some new & half-familiar thing.
cool, I’d say, & get back to whatever I was doing —
there were plenty of distractions then,
the studio owner himself pre-occupied…
Eventually I left the studio, left Memphis,
& for a while my life became much quieter,
living in some shared room a few hundred
miles away. One night, I was red-dot notified
Jared was “going live.” And now? What do I describe?
The video? No longer there. Or what I learned
& spliced together later? Jared had stopped
taking his medication, & had broken up with
his girlfriend, who’d filed, that morning,
a restraining order. The video is dark & blurry —
Jared’s phone, in selfie-mode, is propped up
in some parking lot — somewhere outside a bar —
a light begins to glow a short distance away
& now dark blurs come crowding across
the frame — pushing towards a doorway —
Jared’s phone falls upside down & I crane
my neck to figure out what’s going on —
the light on the screen is growing — glowing
& now too bright & have you seen the calm
of self-immolating monks? This is not
like that at all. Jared has doused himself
in gasoline. He is thrashing. Burning. Overcome.
Later, I learn your muscles stop responding
while your body can still feel. Jared is up
& stumbling towards the door, is no
longer human, shaped into one rising flame.
works. Later, I learn how her palms burn
as she presses back against the presence
at the glass. The glass begins to crack,
but does not give. Jared collapses a final time,
& flashing lights come swirling in & it’s impossible
to make out anything — Jared’s phone is tipped,
or kicked, & points straight up into the stars.
Back then, we’d step out into the parking lot,
light one more joint, then head back in
Reed Turchi
Reed Turchi is a poet and musician from Swannanoa, North Carolina. His writing has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Narrative Magazine, and The Believer, among others, and his music has been featured by Rolling Stone, NPR, PBS, and more. He currently resides in Brooklyn.
