Balls
The boy said, "I know you think that lipstick makes you look pretty,
but it doesn't" and when I said a boy from Uzbekistan was coming
he said, "Why is it always us?" A clutch of demons enters his huge
svelte body and convulses him, propelling him across the pitch
and he burns the ball into the upper right corner like a 500 pound bomb
on a house, in the manner in which he once said he would fight
his aunt's breast cancer, carrying a five gallon jug of water, a bedroll,
batteries, plastic explosives, clothes, night vision goggles, and MREs
and when he wrote about the ballot in Iraq, for a moment I thought
I was going to be reading about the Iraqi ballet. C'est gaga,
he reproved, with all the poise of a scout leader in the mall to his
fractious cub, "We're not going to do that" while handing out hand-balls
printed with "Serving Runaways and Homeless Youth" for us
to bounce against the facticity of being, the throwness of endurance.
Judy Swann
