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.