Kendra DeColo and Tyler Myles, selections from Low Budget Movie

Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize, selected by Heather Treseler

Love Poem with Whip-its and HGTV
 
Call me sweetheart when you fiddle
with the hotel TV reception.
 
Kiss me like a scratch ticket
with one foil moon left to scrape
 
and I’ll soak in the Jacuzzi of your ambivalence
sip from paper cups blessed with saved-up  
 
spit, swallow you in my open concept
living room. Yes, I’m a sucker for HGTV.
 
Don’t we all get off to granite counter tops?
Let me swish awhile in your curls. Call me crazy
 
but I’ll slip two fingers into your bad caulk work  
while we wait for the voiceover that narrates our suspense
 
like rare shimmers of sludge deep in a well;
you and me, two lovers huffing
 
a tank of nitrous
that never expires.

 
Watching Magic Mike with John Waters at the Provincetown Movie House
 
John Waters holds his disappointment
           like a god blessing the room as if to say
                      this is what you call holiness, this sprawl of imitation
                                 glitz, gaudy as a museum gift store paperweight?
 
           Or, why look above when splendor
                      is all around us? The stickiness of bodies
                                 a defiance to the pristine chill where we’ve taken
                                 refuge
                                            from the July 4th mob, obscene
 
as a pool party sometimes. And I still can’t help but feel     
           like we become close to Magic Mike by wanting him,
                      so I am the star of my own jump scene when I bolt
                                 up from my seat and swivel like an Ambien-
 
           stuffed piñata to read fortunes in the bottle caps
                      of liters of Mountain Dew.  A star lives in our blood,
                                 John Waters explains, extraterrestrial life hovering
                                            around our mouths while we stay silent as
                                            Greek
 
statues at the Met. Look at this utopia: the stripper meets the girl
           next door, and they have clean sex—have appearing
                      like one of Yeats’s wild swans at Coole in my mind—
                                 and he pays for everything, and no woman is getting
 
           punched or strangled for being Black.
                      John Waters, you are real to me as the desire
                                 to hold onto something ungodly
                                            in this theatre near the sea that scrubs the
                                            beach
 
like a street cleaning brush. Instead of wads of cash, you hold
           garter snakes in your pocket, gold glitter
                      under your collar, and Vincent van Gogh’s face
                                 silkscreened over your heart.

Women in Line
 
Praise the hands that make a beak, fingertips
           to thumb, but not the quack quack two men mock
 
at us while my mother, sister and I talk about the lost 
           key these turquoise days of August.
 
That particular tenacity of yeast infections 
           from wearing a wet bikini all afternoon
 
inside the orange juice walls of the Dunkin’
           Donuts I don’t need to describe except for
 
the almost black chocolate moons
           and stone-white vanilla rings that seem so easy
 
to taste anywhere, the starry pinched centers
           of crullers whose glazed openings I’d penetrate
 
with my finger as a kid, twirling them like a prize.
           The cashier, petite and Russian, who studied
 
at the community college, would be there
           every morning while I waited for the bus, brewing
 
coffee and making small talk with Ray who spent
           the night in an alleyway nearby. She was always
 
kind, even to the men who sucked on her name
           too long, lurked around for a quick peek of her
 
breasts when she bent down to refill the dispensers.
           Maybe this is where I learned to smile
 
when a man says you’d look better in something
           tight. Praise my mother who knows this too when she
 
looks at the two men who are now pretending
           to flap their wings. You can’t buy pomegranate juice
 
at Dunkin’ Donuts, one of the men jokes,
           and I want to show him the full-on
 
scoby growing inside my swimsuit, tentacles
           of bacteria reaching out from this lacy
 
swamp, ask him to cure it for me by rubbing
           the page of a dictionary with two stray hairs.
 
But women in line don’t speak. We look away 
           like they’re crayfish wriggling through the creamed
 
mud of a pond’s edge—not cranes
           opening & closing startled wings on the water—and have
 
been put there by hymens
           and the press of an iron and the collective
 
voice of an audience that says, You are not
           onstage for us, so Shut Up. Women in line
 
are not in line but on the merry-go-round
           of mescaline these men swallowed together
 
before coddling their cocks in the lodges
           of their baggy jeans and sneering, Our heaven
 
is Hellenic as rape. I had pitied them
           because even now the heteronormative 
 
dictatorship that lingers in my cochlea
           like ear buds pushed in too far with bad music
 
whispers: No girlfriends, lonely men.
           Revenge made an errand of me, hungry
 
for itself. I thought I lost the key, my mother said
           reaching into the maw of her purse,
 
and for a moment I saw something other than
           contempt sprawled across their faces—
 
the desire to have a woman  
           dig deep inside of them, to penetrate
 
and retrieve what they didn’t know
           had been lost.

Tyler Mills is the author of City Scattered (Snowbound Chapbook Award,Tupelo Press 2022), Hawk Parable (Akron Poetry Prize, University of Akron Press 2019), Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, Southern Illinois University Press 2013), and co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (Diode Editions 2021). She teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute, edits The Account, and lives in Brooklyn. 

Kendra DeColo is the author of three poetry collections: I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World (BOA Editions, 2021), My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016), and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House, Waxwing, Los Angeles Review, Bitch Magazine, VIDA, and elsewhere. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.