Strip Poker

I

The emergencies we fear most

must be boredom and love.

At shuttle launch and tram stop

some huckster always has cards

handy, like a Yukon miner

with a stashed brandy flask.

It’s always the boys who get naked,

as they did on this school trip—

shucking off sweatshirts

and crinkled boxers like rookies

after a hockey match, trim bodies aglow

in a thin polymer coat

of breathless bravado. Tiny valentines

dotted one girl’s white bra,

two plump clouds

already raining heartbreak. Your face

is the tarot in the lobby window

when you pass with your children,

years later, the hotel a creamy yellow,

a tall cylinder tilting like a tipsy

girlfriend, ditzy with red terraces,

dangerously close to the luscious crash

of rocky falls. You scurry past,

a schoolmistress ushering orphans

away from swinging saloon doors,

quoting pages of virtue

from their primers, saying nothing

of that night when heartbeats

churned like steamboats

and geese gossiped across the moon.

II

A man named Keefer staked a gold claim and built a shack that still stands on an island of sagebrush and lava rock in the river. The parking lot is the former site of barracks for German and Italian prisoners of war who dug ditches and post holes for eighty cents a day. The late-night talk show host on the TV no one watched tugged pink plaid lapels and kept gazing stage right as if to get a better view of the dim corner table. Down the coal scuttle, cold and starving, is no place to be stranded without spare dynamite or dice. With the gypsy is no place to wish for the fortune you were denied. The suits no one wants: Thief of Youth, Broken Joker, Girl Who Promises Gold and Gives You the Gander.

Matthew James Babcock: Idahoan. Writer. Failed breakdancer. Books: Points of Reference (Folded Word); Strange Terrain (Mad Hat); Heterodoxologies (Educe Press); Four Tales of Troubled Love (Harvard Square Editions, First Place in 2020 Next Generation Indie Book Awards); Future Perfect (finalist for BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize, forthcoming, Engine Books 2020).