By John Wojtowicz

Featured Art: “Pebbles vs. the world” by Leo Arkus

As a kid, I spent Saturday nights  
underneath this boardwalk, poking a dollar bill  
between cracks, pulling it back  
after luring unsuspecting tourists. 
Now I’m back around, fixing up a friend’s beach bungalow: 
paint-peeling and porch-rotting    
on the bay side of town.  
I’ve only walked the boards a few times 
mostly forgoing views of the ocean 
for beer-drenched nights at the Shamrock. 
Tonight, a thunderstorm rolls in  
and the preacher at the boardwalk chapel 
offers shelter to all but those  
with a still lit cigarette. 
Zombie Crusher and Terrordactyl  
don’t let lightening stop them  
from barreling over jumps made of beach sand 
but the amusement rides have ceased to amuse. 
The tram car watches me. 
I like riding the Sea Serpent with its upside-down  
and backwards thrills; 
how for that 1 minute & 48 seconds 
it’s hard to think about anything  
other than staying alive.  
I like the monster trucks too.  
The way they flatten.  
I put out my Marlboro and take shelter  
in the wood-paneled chapel  
next to a handlebar-mustached-man  
sporting a throwback Hulk Hogan  
t-shirt: Hulkamania is running wild, Brother. 
I think about how Dolly Parton  
made a spoof music video  
in which she married Hulk Hogan 
after reading in a tabloid  
that she was having an affair with a professional wrestler.
“He’s got a headlock on my heart, 
it was a take down from the start.” 
For Dolly, it’s all fertilizer; she’s a western- 
wigged buddha two-stepping through life.  
For me, it’s been more of a hot-coal-  
hop-skip. The rain slows, thunder booms. 
I have no special someone for whom  
to buy a pair of custom booty shorts.  
I grab a beer before the concessions close,  
toss rings on bottles, land quarters  
on plates. The unbridled ocean  
gives me chills. I think about how sailors  
wore earrings worth enough  
to cover the cost of their return and burial,  
salt-slicked mariners 
with no need for gold hoops.  
I bend down to pick up a dollar that disappears
before my fingers can grasp it. 
I think I want to be buried at sea too;  
being decomposed by sea lice  
seems more exotic than earthworms. 

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John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery and still lives in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey” with his wife and two children. Currently, he teaches social work at Stockton University. He has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM and several of his poems were chosen to be exhibited in Princeton University’s 2021 Unique Minds: Creative Voices art show at the Lewis Center for the Arts. He has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and serves as the Local Lyrics contributor for The Mad Poets Society Blog. He enjoys fostering dogs and flipping horseshoe crabs. (adapted from Johnwojtowicz.com)