Toothsome Marie Skinner, First Place Iris/Apologue The first time Iris’s own words sung by Jack’s voice ambushed her from her earbuds, her world reeled. It was like falling in love. Or maybe just falling. It took a few months to recover, but now she was ready to meet him again. She filled three notebooks with her writing, sprinkling the pages liberally with unattributed quotes and poems—things that were beautiful and metrical and mysterious. Mostly, she copied out the words of Christina Rossetti in between her own poems. She gave up beauty in her tender youth, gave all her hope and joy; she covered up her eyes, and chose the bitter truth, was right next to a free verse poem about buttons and keys and technology— and she planned to give them all to Jack this afternoon. At this point, she anticipated that he was desperate for new poems. Once, when Jack was still just doing gigs at local bars and coffee shops—back when that was still possible and not a violation of health codes and common sense—Iris had given him a notebook full of drawings instead of poems. Jack almost panicked, and she felt bad for upsetting him, so she shared her inprogress writings. But after she realized why he wanted her poems, she had to think about it. [ 48 ]
More recently, she gave him her to-do lists and writing ideas with extensive comments and corrections in the margins. That reduced Jack to hilarious panic, which Iris was, of course, ready to alleviate with a few poems because she still hadn’t been ready to confront the situation. She didn’t know what to think of him. It wouldn’t have hurt him to admit that he didn’t write his own lyrics the first time an adoring interviewer asked him. He could have given credit where it was due. The doodles and list and marginalia were gentle prods—teasing requests that he at least tell her what he was doing with the poems he pretended to like so much for personal reasons. He pretended to love her work, to be a devotee who hung on every beat and rhyme just like his own budding crop of fans did with his music. She didn’t believe him. He wouldn’t change anything she wrote, he wouldn’t lie about where it came from, and he wouldn’t keep her name hidden in the notebooks if it was true. So this time wasn’t just teasing. She looked forward to discovering if he could figure out what she wrote for him and what had been written in another century by a woman who denied herself chess because winning felt like sinning. Iris loved Christina Rossetti’s style and the bittersweet inscrutability of so many of her poems, and, if Jack couldn’t tell the difference between the rigid, Victorian structure of Rossetti and the dancing wordplay
