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).