Gymnastics Practice

Summers swallowed by 90 degree heat

7 & ½ hours a day, 6 days a week

13 years old, when I say I love uneven-bars

I mean radio play, same 5 songs

lungs crystalized with chalk-cloud air

(chalk: applied to grips, to grip the bars

grips: applied to wrists, to help protect skin)

scrunchie hair-tie, determined eyes

perfecting same routines – toe-point here

extended knee & shoulder press,

body balanced on a forefinger,

trusting feet to guide my land.

I take stalk of bruises left between thighs

count each rip burned into my palm;

quarter-sized blisters, on the bad nights

large enough to fear reaching for another hand—

will they leave, disgusted

by my decimated skin? manglings

of once pure flesh; my childhood, my time.

but the weightlessness. God.

the weightlessness &

how could I not need poetry,

after thousands of hours

with aching hands & a yearning to fly?

When I say I love words I mean

I love the chance to break my neck, & by this:

the miracle of every time I do not.