Big Game Day By Tobi Alfier

They’ve come down the elevators

in Big and Tall shorts,

in Big and Tall shirts,

twelve-packs in each hand.

Their tiny wives with perfect hair

and perfect clothes follow behind,

hope no one starts a fight

at the waffle iron—so embarrassing.

These men love shotglasses

and pulled pork sandwiches. Their wives

prefer champagne flutes

and diet pills.

Look at them—fingers so fat

they can’t hold their cards

at poker, no trouble

shoveling food in their faces,

ignoring their wives, not even

looking up. This is a cheap hotel 

downstreet from a Gentlemen’s Club 

on Game Day, not even a bar for the wives.

Happy Hour is ridiculous.

Nothing happy about Bud Light

and Tostitos—the wives talk themselves

into the Gentlemens’s Club,

spring for bottle service—

two bottles, $200 each.

They let themselves finally laugh.

Win or lose, not a total loss.

Tobi Alfier is published nationally and internationally. Credits include War, Literature and the Arts, The American Journal of Poetry, KGB Bar Lit Mag, Washington Square Review, Cholla Needles, James Dickey Review, Gargoyle, Permafrost, Arkansas Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others.  She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com).