Ever After

If only every billboard model, 20-foot high
grins hinting they've got it all figured out, Jack,
that they're living the life, the real life,

if only these models would just come down
& apologize to every single person
driving past in the haze of their life-sized lives.

What happens to us? One week Jill
catches Jack gazing at some low-cut, short
skirted magazine cover & the same heavy-

lidded, open mouthed look that says
passion, lust
to Jack becomes embedded in Jill's dowdy head

& taunts her the rest of that night,
well into the next week. Finally it is too much.
She questions Jack's every move, unable

to say whether she "loves him" or not.
Who's smiling now? Weeks later we find
Jack in every all night supermarket magazine aisle

trying to find himself in all the paper smiles
& at that same moment Jill is looking for herself
in the bedroom mirror & is looking still.

© Nate Pritts

COMMENTARY:

It's always interesting to hear writers talking about the craft; sometimes they're smart about their work and intention, sometimes not. As a poet I think I should stop blathering and let my work do the talking but as a reader, I'm endlessly fascinated by what people have to say about process, so I offer my own.

I was driving around, feeling inferior in the big broad face of all the pretty smiling billboard girls and burly handsome billboard guys and wishing our society had made different choices than the ones it had. I knew it wouldn't solve all my problems but having these "models" come down and apologize to me for making me feel so lessened seemed about as likely as getting an apology from the ad agencies (who are, to be fair, just trying to do their job; whose fault is it that we all want to want?). So I started with that sort of fanciful image and went from there, just playing with words and rhythms. My poems tend towards a more conversational diction and I always try to build friction from that; I want to find a way to work against that loosening and in this poem I decided to work in three line stanzas as a way of imposing a kind of structure. The move to give names to our two beleaguered citizens was inspired by that verbal play (I'd introduced Jack early on, though he was more of a verbal mannerism). But the whole thing seems like a fairy tale, like a kind of myth-truth so I decided it was really appropriate to include the only two storybook characters (besides Adam and Eve) that fell hard.