in my man cave

Tom Hunley

The awful silence kept going and growing
like our teenagers and our grocery bills.
My self-consciousness had fallen away like my hair
so if you told me I looked ridiculous
posing with a Flying V I couldn’t hear you
over my own power chords as I sat
by my essential oils diffuser filled with
frankincense and lavender. I closed my eyes,
saw a coffin open up like the lips
of the first girl I ever kissed.
Mosquitos feasted on my neck
which also reminded me of the first girl I kissed,
her name gone like the title of a movie
I remember liking but don’t remember.
I poured a flight of bourbons and entered
a poetry anthology where I saw a sunset
that looked like a hummingbird’s wings giving out
and I tasted a bourbon with hints of sour apple
and felt as forgotten as a sentence in the middle
of a technical manual, though in the background
one of our kids grunted and sweated beneath
a barbell while the others made a ping pong ball
sound like popcorn popping. More bourbon,
more essential oils until again I saw the first girl
I ever kissed, her body older and then gone
like steam from my diffuser and I said hey girl,
you’re just a symbol of my lost youth anyway
and listened harder to the music and poetry
telling me my struggles, which I hold so close,
will come to a close, telling me that
before 1932, the entire world lived without
electric guitars and may have felt the lack
without really knowing what it was, just this feeling
of missing something loud and essential.
And this feeling in me, maybe it amounted to
missing something that hadn’t been invented yet.
News blared in the background but no one listened
and that no one was me.

Tom C. Hunley won the 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize for Adjusting to the Lights. In 2021, C&R Press released What Feels Like Love: New and Selected Poems. Tom directs the MFA Creative Writing program at Western Kentucky University, where he has taught since 2003.