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During the Pandemic, I watch Caddyshack Again and Again
by Christina Olson

June 4, 2021 Contributed By: Christina Olson

Television
Photo by Stephen Monterroso on Unsplash

This poem was selected as a finalist for the 2021 MAYDAY Poetry Prize.

My favorite part is when Danny swings his body
down the fire escape, tippy-toes onto the porch railing,

throws a leg over the old ten-speed with the handlebars
like ram horns, and pedals off to the country club. Eighteen

and invincible. Danny cuts across train tracks, no helmet.
Kenny Loggins is playing, again and again. The women

in this movie have real hair, frizzy and uneven, like they curled
and set it themselves. In the evenings, they light cigarettes

and drink highballs. I can’t imagine feeling safe in a room
with strangers ever again, breathing the same humid,

tainted air. Of course I’m watching a movie from 1980,
of course I wish I were Carl, smoking weed in my barn

and obsessed with bluegrass propagation. I am sewing
masks from old t-shirts while onscreen, people place bets

on whether a kid will eat a booger. Chase and Murray
famously despised each other on set, and in real life;

here in 2020, we know that Chevy is the worst, while
Bill’s our favorite uncle. I first watched Caddyshack

when I was nine, with my uncle, and when Maggie
pulled off her top, he said, I forgot about this part.

Maybe don’t tell your dad. Thrilling, this membership
to the adult world, its casual racism and topless women.

But it was also so, so stupid, and therefore deeply funny.
I laugh more in the pandemic than I thought I would.

I have to. My president denies that a virus is killing us.
That’s it. That’s the poem that is your life. Of course

sometimes, after a long day of doomscrolling, you make
a highball, and you daydream of cigarettes, and you put

on Caddyshack. You rewind over and over the moment
when Danny is dangling from the ladder, feet off

the porch. His body tells him to stop thinking and just let go,
that it will take over from here. You’ll get nothing, and like it


CHRISTINA OLSON is the author of Terminal Human Velocity (Stillhouse Press, 2017). Her chapbook The Last Mastodon won the Rattle 2019 Chapbook Contest. Other work appears in The Atlantic, The Normal School, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction. She is an associate professor at Georgia Southern University and tweets about coneys and mastodons as @olsonquest.

Filed Under: Featured Content, Poetry Posted On: June 4, 2021

Further Reading

Out of Body
by Liza Olson

I am lying flat on the ground in a quiet living room in a quiet home in the kind of quiet suburb everyone’s at least driven through, if not lived in. I am breathing deeply, from my diaphragm, like the VHS instructed.

Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin
translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang,
reviewed by Jacqueline Schaalje

The daring viewpoint of a homophobe widow makes for a toe-curling, but also hopeful read in the riveting Korean bestseller by Kim Hye-jin, Concerning My Daughter, dealing with the loneliness and ostracism of a lesbian couple and a single elderly woman.

Unrequited
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I’m masturbating across the hall from her dying.  I’ve just finished giving her a bed bath. With that crazy half-detachment required when someone you love has stopped being that person. And has become instead this sickness. A moany dissolving body to be turned and agitated and tended. She can’t take soap or touch. I squeezed water from a soft […]

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