ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

His breath frosts the air. The practice field dusted white and cleat-gouged, we have risen into clouds of his making. Everything white, our defensive huddle, a bulbous-headed choir of numbered angels--huffing small clouds to worship him.

"Ready. Break."

I am already gone. I rise above the practice field, above the knot of my body left pushing face mask to face mask against a friend from algebra class. We chug our legs, club at one another in thick, white air, and on these powdered bones of our coach's winter, which mute the crunch of pad against pad, my body slips and falls.

Our coach shouts me upright. His head is the shape and size of desire, the pores and scars on his nose. His palpable breath clouds the ear hole of my helmet. One hand is the size of a sirloin steak on the shoulder, the other is the size of a bee sting swatting the ass.

I zoom in and out of my body. As I rise above the practice field, he gets smaller. As I fall, the cold and my own desire to win, grow like welts on the back of my hands. My real feet are gone. Empty shoes pound frozen ground. I hear mud breaking.

What our coach wants he can't have.

He is locked in the body. His erratic arms spray the air. He slaps my helmet hard, as spit and derision flap aberrant his lips. Wild hairs in his eyebrows and moustache don't know what length to grow. Pores on the flares of his snotted nostrils. Hairs in the mole on his neck. His irises shudder like distressed planets as his lips bark fog into disorder.

Yes, I want it, too. How else can I continue to exist in this storm, listening with intent and nodding even as I leave my young body and rise through the air to maintain this stance now in these lines where I speak this poem?