Superhero Beach Towels

This poem was written in 2002 for a Creative Writing class in college. I recently found it amidst a heap of old writing in the basement and decided to rework it. Willow Ridley really digs this poem, and so I dedicate it to him.

We’d kept our heads above water
just long enough to hear an adult’s lofty voice
calling us back to shore.

We glared at the descending sun
with silent disdain.
It had betrayed us.

It would sparkle and shatter again
on this same Great Lake tomorrow,
in spite of our departure.

The waves had escorted us far away from our
tip-toed entrance. We had left behind superhero beach towels
laid just outside the stretch of the frigid tide.

Now, one by one, we surrendered the
refreshing smack of broken crests,
the raw scent of drenched inner-tubes.

Our bodies too frail, the current too strong,
we waddled inland in slow motion,
cursing the water’s one way ticket.

Bones rattling like beads in a can of spray paint,
teeth chattering like Scooby Doo’s in a haunted freezer,
noses leaking like punctured water balloons.

At last I reached Wolverine’s one-dimensional pounce,
his grizzled snarl and vanishing metal claws
soon to be retired as a basement relic.

Beyond the shore loomed the sum total of futures that boded
medication and depressive submission, religious oppression,
the hell-raking rebellion of high school dropouts blindsided by fatherhood.

I smothered that towel against my face—
not so much because I was freezing,
but to veil the glare from beyond the shore.