A Hole in the Hull by Todd Mercer

Movies show resourceful characters
thriving after fate strands them.
Boat sinks, heroes work it out—
a common TV Guide slug-line.
By contrast, those actually marooned
on obscure Pacific islands
typically didn’t graduate
from wilderness survival school.
That’s where you climb rocks
and the instructors ask you:
Which three items
would you take?
When a ship wrecks
on an unmarked reef,
passengers don’t know
what’s indispensable.
Nine times in ten
they let it sink with the craft.
Those swept overboard
make for awful television leads.
Castaways on the average
are (frankly) fairly out of shape
when they wash up
on the sparkling sands
of nowhere atolls.
They’re un-handy, accident-prone,
they are soon hungry. And then…
It’s easy to become unbalanced,
lacking other human reference.
Stuck without calories,
bad at fishing. Missing all their shows.
Real castaways fail at survival,
they suffer and expire
before rescuers get there.
It’s not exotic, what comes of regular people
when ships crack open out there.
If ever stranded, be strong,
strive to be cinematic.
Beat those long odds
sell the film rights,

play yourself if the money is fair.

Todd Mercer was nominated for Best of the Net in 2018. Mercer won 1st, 2nd & 3rd place of the Kent County Dyer-Ives Poetry Prizes and the won Grand Rapids Festival Flash Fiction Prize. Recent work appears in: The Magnolia Review, Plum Tree Tavern and Praxis.