Boardwalk Blues
Melissa Balmain
Joggers trot or gallop by
without provoking jeers.
Bikers, bladers, skaters fly,
and no one ever sneers.
Surfers? Swimmers? Not harassed,
even when they’re half-bare-assed,
bodacious folk.
But power walkers, gals like me,
clothed from top to tip,
elbows pumping earnestly—
we get all the lip
from rows of flabby, leering guys
sitting with their Hostess pies
and cans of Coke.
We’re perfect targets, that’s the crux,
mechanical and slow,
a line of shooting-gallery ducks.
One thought does cheer me, though:
Men who exercise their tongues
instead of legs and hearts and lungs
are first to croak.
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From Melissa’s collection Walking in on People (chosen by X.J. Kennedy for the Able Muse Book Award)
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Melissa’s notes: “Now that climate change has turned seasons into free-for-alls, who knows what weather we’ll get this month in New York? Even so, I think of June as the time to break out my shorts—boardwalk trolls be damned.”
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Melissa Balmain edits Light, North America’s longest-running journal of comic verse, and teaches writing at the University of Rochester. Her poems and/or prose have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Ecotone, The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Nimrod, Poetry Daily, and Rattle. Her latest book of poetry is Satan Talks to His Therapist (Paul Dry Books).
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