Read Hacker’s poem here.

Let’s just love it.
Let’s go over it like a sore gum you tongue for pleasure,
watch it strut around the room in boxers and a half-buttoned Oxford,
wearing July and unspoken things.

The poem winks and waits:
it plays the long game,
longing with form,
desiring with structure,
trysting with time.

The refrain is a striptease.
Every time it returns, it reveals a little more —
not skin, exactly, but heat —
not the body, but the gambling on the body.

And the register is genius —
casual, cocky, confessional, queer —
villanelle as game of gay chicken
where no one backs down.

Admire the discipline behind it,
the control it takes
to keep that form
from buckling,
to ride the poem’s swell
and not break until the end.

“I bet” is flirtation as speculation,
as lyric economy,
risk in the conditional.

Some poems don’t bet:
they become the table,
the chips,
the gleam on the dealer’s garter.

And you
are already sitting there,
sleeves rolled up,
speaking through poems, 
staking your life on them,
all in.

So, yes.
Let’s just love it,
until the strawberries are ripe,
until the troops get home,
until the shoulder pads come off.