Cloudbank 20

This poem by Rolly Kent was the winner of the Cloudbank 20 Prize.

The Tiger / Rolly Kent

When the Platters sang, Heavenly shades of night
are falling, the light in the Sacred Heart C.Y.O.
fell with the suddenness of sin, turning the same
dark green as the dress of the classmate
I didn’t recognize when she came over, smiling,
and took me by the hand to where the shadows cast by
the basketball backboard obscured the dancers.

In that dimness she looked like an emerald tiger,
her dress tight as a pelt, her eyes, as she spun
to face me, widened like two mascara moths
compelled by a light I did not understand.
She checked the hall for chaperones then
pulled me in closer than was proper—

What did I know of Catholicism?
The walls perspired a dizzying musk.
But since Presbyterians were taught to do
unto others as you would have them do to you,
I obliged, feeling all the way down the heaven
of skin where her dress was cut low in back—

Spreading my fingers to gather as much of her
as they could, I danced on through the valley
of the shadow of breasts, and when Monsignor
wasn’t looking, she pressed herself closer still
and my hands met each other where, if she
had been an angel, the wings would have been.
We were so close my heart was beating in her chest,
and just as she started to undo my zipper
the music stopped—and that was that.

“Bye,” she said, and turned away, moving to
the beat of La Bamba. I watched my handprints
fade from her skin as she swished and swayed
from boy to boy, prowling between startled couples
until she vanished into the forests of the night.

Poets and Writers in Cloudbank 20