I Put the Game On but I Haven't Yet Looked Up at the Score

I want to put the word wingspan in a poem

& I want the poem to sing. My words

have empty bank accounts. My hand has a partner.

My arm has a partner. No wonder

I feel disassociated from my body. I like that I live

not where I live. My daughter is writhing on the floor in her cough.

I look up, finally: The Heat are down almost twenty in game five.

The drafthouse we populated with our children earlier

looked like a messy living room for hours, the couches even

pushed from their perfect right angles. There, I told my friends

how I blew the rebound—no, no, how he covered me in gasoline,

lit a match, threw it in my direction, & walked away—

& the rebound’s rebound, long after that fire extinguished,

how he just walked away.

A tree towers over my yard.

It’s spring still & its nests are empty. My heart

is bankrupt & unreliable because overspent.

The people I want to text me back

aren’t the ones texting back. I hate this commercial

because it reminds me of how he hates this commercial.

My daughter is tired, facedown on the floor, with the iPad.

The floor, yes, where a week ago, fleas writhed. My hand

has a partner. I stretch my arms out as if to take off.

The wandering albatross can have a wingspan of nearly eleven feet.

My wrist has a partner. My eye has one too. I want him

to want at least a letter from me, a postmarked envelope

full of all my favorite cashless words.

I am so full of words & blood & so alone.

The men on the screen in technicolor & live

but so much like a cartoon, & the announcers, actors reading a script.

From this present moment, from its clenched teeth, I am so far & full.

 

The Guy at the Free Throw Line Shoots 66%

The announcers mean to say two in three. They mean to say

he wasn’t the one coach wanted holding the ball

when the other team had to foul. They mean to say

 

you are born with a reserve of eggs

& as you age they age too; & as they age,

they’re exposed to everything

you’re exposed to: doing coke

in the Trocadero bathroom with Desi,

smoking joints with Jordan & Gui

in the middle of the frozen pond under

the bridge in the Boston Gardens, breathing in

whatever your Alabama neighbors are burning in their yard today.

 

They mean to say, no more than but they say less than.

All those years paranoid because of how hormonal birth control

makes you too much. All those years of condoms. All those years.

They mean to say still—they mean to say chance.

 

I’m so mean on anesthesia. An abortion

could someday save my life. Look,

I just want to get laid & not worry

about have a nervous breakdown during

the two-week wait. My D&C saved my life.

Mistoprostol saved my best friend’s life.

 

Sixty-six percent isn’t great, but let’s not

take any chances. Tie me to the bed

& let’s just hold hands.