Heavy Duty
Mid-July afternoon dragging
its heels as we cleaned dorm
rooms one by one, built
& broke down bunk-beds
between each group of
campus visitors (musicians,
poets, middle school
soccer camps). It was
the kind of job you had
to work to be relieved of,
though some still found
a way, knocking themselves
out by mixing bleach
& ammonia-based cleaners
in adjacent shower stalls.
It was a Friday. There was a bucket
behind a stairwell that we
had somehow overlooked.
Orange, plastic, with one
of those drowning child
illustrations on the side.
The bucket housed
some dark & rotten thing,
so we drew straws, & Kip,
someone’s younger brother,
drew short. We propped
the doors, gave him extra
gloves, good lucks, & goggles.
It became the story we drank
to all that summer — hauling
out each time to embellish
with some new detail — like
how he strained to lift
what must have been
heavier than he imagined —
or the ways his steps
turned asymmetric
as he toddled towards
the doors, all of us
standing around
& laughing — but
here’s what I brought
you here to see — the
way no light rainbowed
in that thick viscous
arc he hurled across
the lawn — & then —
how long it took
to recognize the clumps
of hair & bone as they
slid out — all our adolescent
lives turned Hamlet —
the slick skull glistening
before us
Reed Turchi is a poet and musician from Swannanoa, North Carolina, now living in Brooklyn. His debut collection, "Dancing with Poets," was selected by Victoria Chang for the 2026 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and he won a Grammy Award and received an Emmy nomination for his music. Turchi earned his MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was awarded the Ellen Bryant Voigt Scholarship.
“Heavy Duty” appears in Reed Turchi’s Dancing with Poets, winner of the 2026 Colorado Prize for Poetry selected by Victoria Chang and forthcoming from University Press of Colorado in November. Available for pre-order here.