Scott Tucker

“Red Bird Mall Revisited (September 15th, 2024)” was inspired by a life changing cancer diagnosis my grandfather received, and the experience I had telling him the news. Contemplating the task before I went into his room, I could see the roof of Red Bird Mall through the hospital windows, a place we would often visit together when I was a child. I fantasized about he and I going there decades ago to buy a He-Man toy and telling him how I couldn’t wait to be a man. 

The poem aims to capture a moment in my life, that’s hard to digest but made a little easier through reflection and documentation. 

The images of the toys in the poem each float individually on single lines to show both the child self, making an isolated and insulated world on the floor, as well as to segue into those objects’ current absurdity—now juxtaposed against the stark realities of life and death in the present. My choice of syntax aims to create an organized list of both fictional characters and real-life occurrences within seven different stanzas to negotiate the relationships built between each stanza and my current self. I deploy bizarre-sounding character names to highlight this absurdity, using a level of accuracy verging on self-diagnosing obsessive-compulsive disorder — a common reaction to distress. The poem’s structure mirrors the revelation in the poem: from six stanzas in tercets to the hard shift into the stark finality of the diagnosis in the final couplet.

“I Bought a Bag of Clothes” was inspired by a visit to the Galleria in Dallas, Texas in the fall of 2024. While walking through a department store, I noticed a display of mannequins resembling the way my family used to dress in the 1990’s. The vision briefly took me back to happier times when everyone in my family was alive and holiday shopping together. After further inspecting the display, and without any intention of buying anything, I tried the items on and felt so comfortable in both the clothing and the past, I purchased the entire lot.

This poem aims to recognize how physical objects may evoke intense feelings or nostalgia for time passed and people lost. Only through this recognition can we critically self-reflect on how consumer culture creates certain associations of people as objects, and objects as people. Objects may work well to help one briefly escape the present, but such feelings can evaporate just as quickly as a credit card can be swiped. 

The poetic form chosen for this piece was free verse to reflect a sort of deregulation of the emotional state of the poem and myself upon witnessing the arrangement of the clothing.

The poem consists of eight irregular stanzas broken up into mostly tercets and couplets apart from a single quatrain. This quatrain which is the fifth stanza acts as the longest list of “items” both lost and found again, only parallelled by the third stanza which is a list of family members. The use of lists acts as a tool of order to reinforce elements of obsessive-compulsive disorder and its usefulness as a coping mechanism. Only the sixth stanza is perfectly balanced and spaced as a reflection of the persona’s past, representing certain order and tranquility. In the final couplet, a long space opens the first line to create a particular dread and sigh before the final thought is delivered.