Wild Turkey Elizabeth Gold I tell you I saw this once—tangleof typewriters piled upon a city street like a pyrewaiting to be lit, levers stillhalf lifted as if trying to haila cab. Oh, they were beautiful,these discarded messengersof the machine age, their names,Olivetti, Royal, Underwood, picked outin gold, and I almost rescued one,hefting it from its nest of emptywhiskey bottles—Wild Turkey,they were, flock decimatedby the light of burning midnightoil, but ghosts, I think, preferthe company of ghosts, that’s whywe seldom see them, but we hear them,sometimes, typing away at that lifesentence, bars rising with the pressof fingertips on the keys, unlockingthe words: send help. Elizabeth Gold is the author of the memoir Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity (Tarcher/Penguin, 2003). Her poems have appeared in many journals, among them Field, the Indiana Review, and the Mid-American Review. A former New Yorker, she is currently living in Edinburgh, Scotland. “Wild Turkey” appears in our Summer 2010 issue.