Heating and Cooling in the Time of Isolation – by Jessica L Wilkinson
HIGHLY COMMENDED IN THE GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2020/21
The elastic on my tracksuit pants has given way.
I grab at it, loop an old hair tie around the bunch—
once, twice, thrice—
and make a material dickie (there’s hair on the tie).
I bat it around as I wait for the kettle.
Outside pants will have a surge in sales, I had said
to a friend on Zoom.
And shoes, she said.
For a short moment, I get a little sad.
The kettle boils as I think about Road House
a Netflix watch from last Friday night.
I’d eaten a special brownie and it
had taken me some time to realise the film
was actually about the best bouncer in the business.
Sometimes, I can be a snob.
And I was probably fixating.
But can one be praised for being ‘the best’
at something no one really cares about?
This was the first of my concerns. More important
was the fact that Dalton is the worst bouncer
I had ever seen. (I haven’t seen a lot of bouncers.)
I’m a cooler, Dalton says. As if that
is a cool thing to be. He cools things down,
doesn’t resort to violence. This is his specialty.
This makes him the best in the business.
Pretty soon, the bar that hired him breaks out
in a brawl. Dalton steps in to cool things down, but
nothing cools. He must resort, quickly,
to his martial arts skills. There’s a lot of violence.
The film features a lot more violence
and very little, if any, cooling. This left me
puzzled. I consoled myself with a bag
of spicy corn chips and a glass of milk.
And I’m pouring a bit of milk in a mug right
now. I pour it over granules of freeze-dried
Moccona. I’m an impatient person.
I like it when things are ready to go.
When that kettle clicks I like to pour and run.
Not run, exactly, but move relatively fast—
right now, as fast as my moccasins allow me to move,
back to my desk in the living room, adjacent
to the kitchen, my semi-permanent work situation.
I have two more meetings on Microsoft Teams
before knock-off, one of which is likely to get
heated. I wonder if I could be: best at filling in time
while the kettle boils; best at repurposing stretched
pants; best at staring down a heated conversation
on Microsoft Teams while my coffee cools beside me—
so good at the last, in fact, that others think I’ve frozen in time.
For some reason—inexplicable—I wonder:
Why would a villain be introduced into the world
of bouncing? I write poetry. The stakes are low and no one
cares. Say ‘poet’, you may as well say ‘bouncer’. But things
in the poetry world can still get heated. I’ve seen
red faces, cold stares. Heard urban myths of punches thrown.
I could write the screenplay to a feature film called
Poet House. A poet laureate comes in to a literary community
to cool the jets of rival factions. The poet is paid
so handsomely, in fact, that the community hub defaults
on the rent, and collapses completely. Best all-round fantasy.
A poet never cooled a fight. ‘Best poet’ is like
‘best bouncer’. The trophy is a little
joke. Through the window, I can see the sun
has emerged from behind clouds. I get a little sad.
(Weather exerts this pressure.) I realise that
all this thinking has cooled my coffee. And that,
when this is over, I’ll have to shuck my moccasins,
strap myself into a bra. I’ll have to shelve my busted
tracksuit pants, my material dickie, which made me feel
so much more stress free, so nonchalant. So cool.
This poem appeared in Island 161 in 2021. Order a print issue here.
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