Zack Morris Is a Grade-A Douchebag by Angela Voras-Hills
Poetry editor Nicolette Ashley Visciano on today’s poem: Angela Voras-Hills crafts a spotlight as sharp as a permanent side-smile, casting language upon the shadows of adolescence hidden in plain sight. Similar to television cameras set up at all angles, Voras-Hills captures the eerie subtext underneath laugh tracks by exploring where a scripted sitcom and extemporaneous reality converge. Stanzas replay moments like re-runs, stuck in a timeless space where past and present impose themselves on one another to entrap the reader in a goldfish’s bowl. In life, there is only one take—you can wish you had felt differently, you can laugh until you throw up, you can be dragged all the way home, but you can never go back.
Zack Morris Is a Grade-A Douchebag
Is or was? Like all the teenage boys I’ve forgotten,
it’s hard to know which tense he exists in. Perpetually
side-smiling, checking the mirror, running
fingers through his blonde hair. How did we all
want the boy who used subliminal messages
to pressure girls into making out with nerds, kissed
his best friend’s crush, auctioned off his female friends?
He fucked up so hard each week, but we loved him,
watched each Saturday morning to see if he’d win-over
Kelly, if she could change him. How much
power did any of us have? At the eighth-grade
Lion’s Club dance, James asked me to sit on his lap.
The cute girl he’d been talking to skulked away,
defeated. When he leaned me back onto the bench
to kiss me, I sunk into it like a goldfish in a bowl
at the fair, newly won. I wish I’d been embarrassed
when someone’s grandma bent over my face,
said, “You can get up now,” but I was flushed,
giggling, started laughing hard, like
in kindergarten when I got off the bus
after punching Tyler in the face for calling me
a name that still surges through my blood
like diesel. When the driver told my mom
what I’d done, I couldn’t stop laughing, nearly
threw up from laughing, my mom’s jaw clenched
as she pulled my hand toward home.
Angela Voras-Hills's first book, Louder Birds (Pleiades 2020) was awarded the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, and Best New Poets among other journals and anthologies. She has received support from The Sustainable Arts Foundation, Key West Literary Seminar, and Writers' Room of Boston. She lives with her family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she is a PhD candidate and coordinates The Book Drop Reading Series.
