Jordan Hamel

The new husbands of Michigan

First Runner-up for the 2024 American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Judged by Denise Duhamel

I stare into the YMCA water fountain and find myself 
wet with humanity. Prone on an unwiped bench press, 
I lick the pleather. Their sweat is mine now. I’m always willing
to delegate labor to the unknown. I’m not willing 
to feel anything for lives gone, or not yet gone, or not
yet: house cats, piping plovers, second-cousins, mine, 
my local representatives, the new husbands of Michigan.
Taking off their rings and wrapping them in microfiber.
Making eyes with the mirror wall. Raising deltoids 
like a peacock’s rattle to build shoulders for future children 
to sit upon, ornamental angels, seasonal relics, doled out 
by a generous god. I’m worried we’ve been given
a finite amount of grief and, like Christmases, 
mine will all come at once. Mine will come
like an old priest who gives in and loses everything 
to a faithless moment, then re-finds something 
in the refractory period’s slack jaw. Will I feel regret?
Am I choosing to abstain? I think the metaphor holds, 
like the husbands’ form: lats firing, core engaged, 
arms stretched like Christ and his colleagues, 
dumbbells where the nails were.

Jordan Hamel is an Aotearoa New Zealand writer and performer. He is currently at the University of Michigan on a Fulbright Scholarship. His debut poetry collection, Everyone is Everyone Except You, was published in New Zealand by Dead Bird Books in 2022 and will be published by Broken Sleep in the UK in 2024. He is also the co-editor of No Other Place to Stand, an anthology of NZ and Pacific climate change poetry from Auckland University Press (2022). He is the winner of the 2023 Sonora Review Poetry Competition, judged by Maggie Smith, and the 2023 New Writers UK Poetry Prize. Recent work can be found or is forthcoming in POETRY, Electric Literature, The Adroit Journal, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.