Second Place Winner, April 2002 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

Filed In:

Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Second Place Winner, April 2002

HE KNOWS HE'S IN DEEP
Brett Hursey
(The Critical Poet)

He knows he's in deep

when she nudges him out of a dream
at four a.m. to rub her tush.

“Why should I rub your tush?”
he mumbles, trying to slip
back beneath his warm, flannel
subconscious.

“Because I like the way it feels
when I'm lonely,” she says.

And, of course, the illogic
of it keeps him awake:
the idea that loneliness
somehow migrates south --
a decade's worth of Saturday nights
and singles clubs
instinctively flocking
together to drift down her back.
It's like the way she's started
asking him to buy Kotex:

“As long as you're going out, pick up
some pads for me,” she says, cutting
up carrots in his sink.

And he just wishes she wouldn't call them “pads”
because it spoils his memory
of high school football --
the image of him high-fiving the guys
in the locker room with Kotex taped
to his shoulders and legs.

So he finds himself crossing off
items on her shopping list --
not even coming close to the familiar
sandwich meat and frozen dinner sections.
And the check-out girls all know
what's going on --
smiling at the Betty Crocker
and broccoli in his cart,
and calling for price checks
on her extra-absorbent,
heavy-flow, feel-fresh-all-day “pads.”
That's when he makes up his mind
to rip down her lacy curtains,

toss the curling iron and feminine
hygiene products out on the lawn
and change all his locks...
but when he finally pulls into the driveway,
the strangely inhabited look
of his house makes him wonder

where his own loneliness has migrated.
So when she asks why he's smiling
while he rubs her smooth, shapely tush
at four in the morning,
he says he's waiting for a genie to appear,

and listens as her laughter soft-shoes
around the room and makes itself at home
in their bedroom carpet

Judge Sheila Bender's comment: “I like narrative poems best when they use story telling techniques like plot, action, chronological time and dialog well but ultimately arrive at the kind of insight that only lyric values (sound and image) offer. Through the lyric embedded in the narrative (the way Kotex is used, for instance), this poem depicts and then celebrates the speaker's journey beneath his male behavior of experiencing woman as other to the intimacy of connection, not only with her, but with himself. The idea that loneliness migrates to a place on the body that another can touch and that the laughter of a partner can settle in the bedroom carpet like an antidote is wondrous, the fruit inside a shell.”