Hermit Crab Challenge Third Place Winner: “The Timesick Poet” by Steven C. Wright
Join us in celebrating our third place winner of the Hermit Crab Challenge! Steven C. Wright’s “The Timesick Poet.”
Wright’s poem immediately caught our eye as the irreverent mixture of a lighthearted form hijacked to address the very real and existential fears of aging and the way life can seem to pass us by. We see the poet’s anxiety perfectly described in lines exaggerated to a dramatic fever pitch, such as “it’s already been this many days since you saw your friends,” to which the answer is “157,” but there are also tender moments that make us connect and relate to the speaker of the poem, whose final lines referencing a “lovely present” hold a subtly double meaning. The poem is not only inventive, it plays on the poet’s deepest fears of legacy and obscurity, while being one of the most successful iterations of the hermit form we received throughout the challenge—thanks, Steven!
Steven C. Wright (he/him) is a queer poet and prose author from Edison, New Jersey. He has a B.A. in English from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and runs a small poetry workshop group every week. His work has appeared in Serotonin Press, BRAWL, Cathexis Northwest Press, and elsewhere.
