Metal Knee

Yes, you piss me off when I attempt to extricate myself

from the car after a long drive and you’re stiff as the face

of an assistant principal scolding a habitual class-skipper.

Yes, my hobble to the gas pump – stiletto of pain spiking

from calf to hip – likely affords pity in others pulling up

in vehicles more luxurious.

Yes, I lumber pathetic on the freshman diamond, unable

to catch a fly ball or field a grounder unless my players

hit it directly at me.

Yes, my daily jaunt across the street with the dog when

the walk sign turns silver constitutes the maximum

distance I can actually run.

But know this, knee of titanium who alerts the TSA

agents to the potential of something amiss, who

necessitates my swallowing antibiotics an hour

before any dental appointment, who occasioned

this alabaster fishing-line scar – it is good for me

to understand I cannot stand fully on my own.

It is good for me to know I would wobble

and totter without your flex and lock beneath

my skin. I can be a cold storage refrigerator,

bolted and unforgiving. I can be a street sign

that weathers a hurricane even when pointed

in the wrong direction. I can be an eighteen-

wheeler thundering through a red light. You,

metal hinge attached to my organic strings,

remind me someone else managed to fix

something wrong within me. There was

a procedure. Someone with knowledge

I don’t own opened me up, got to work,

made me, if not

quite whole, pretty

dang close.

Outside School Today

My swollen knee swallows a pufferfish 

that seems earnestly interested in puffing. 

Stiff, sharp pains too. Every step down the stairs

feels like my 9th grade girlfriend broke up with me 

because I was too boring. You know what though? 

I suspect I’m doing pretty well for a dumbass 

who perched his school-issued laptop on the banister 

of said stairwell so he can tighten the drawstring 

so his shorts won’t fall down. Gravity, apparently 

pissed off at losing the comedy of a teacher’s pants 

plunging earthward, enacts its revenge when the laptop 

plummets two flights like the stock market after another 

puerile tariff threat and crashes to the floor with a stomach-

churning smack. Yes, indeed, the screen foments a Liberty 

Bell style crack, fissures as pathetically as our current 

democracy and, no, my heart does not flutter, stop, skip,

freeze, cease, or whatever the requisite response

is supposed to be despite the hard drive containing 

a 500-page unpublished novel, half of another, a million

lesson plans and perhaps seven thousand poems-in-progress.

Listen, a busted computer is a calamity, but the sky today

hovers with the kind of grey that beckons a salty New

England squall and I text our building’s Patron Saint

of Technology, whose name, no lie, sounds exactly

like Ready, and she texts back promptly with assurances

about a teacher’s loaner she will bequeath me tomorrow,

and a breeze growls like a courtside announcer clearing

his throat, pouncing on the microphone with a howl

– somewhere right now, in this country,

someone is being grabbed off the street

by masked men and delivered who knows where.

Somewhere across the globe a kid dies outside

a hospital padlocked when we tossed its funding 

into the woodchipper. Or filled the coffers

of another nation who bulldozed it. I’ve got trans

kids on my roster who feel like they could be 

murdered any day and their killer will be pardoned.

Someone needs to pray for my shattered computer.

I won’t.

Cambridge MA, March 2024

I’m there to watch my nephew sing

in his final undergraduate concert

and a dude in his group uncorks

a baritone that sounds like the rumble

of thunder before the boom, there is

a house in New Orleans and the next

day I’m still trembling from the sense

a shadow stalks the earth with shoulders

like cinder blocks and I can do nothing

to stem its advance even after a hearty

waffle and omelet and a walk around

the Charles River and a nap and I wake

to the Final Four, Iowa vs. UConn,

and Caitlin Clark stepping back

to drain a three, then another,

then a drive to the rim for a lay-up,

but it’s not her shooting that shakes

the tremors. It’s the pass that squirrels

through three defenders to an open

teammate, it’s the full-court hurl

that drops into the fingers of a sprinting

post player – it’s Paul Bunyan wielding

his axe, Jack conning his escape back

to his beanstalk, Serena Williams kissing

the bass line with an ace. Let’s not make

this about Angel Reese, a tenacious rebounder

deserving of her own hosannas. Let’s make

this about a Saturday afternoon in a hotel room,

about a body haunted to its marrow, and about

a woman banishing all the ghosts with a spin,

a sharp-eyed glance, an arrow nocked in her bow.