Tyra Collette doesn’t remember laughter, but she once walked on ice
that used to be water. Dillon is someone’s name and a town
in Texas and a panther, and they play football there sometimes, in Dillon,
the town in Texas—always on Fridays, in a stadium the size ofthe colosseum,
with the same amount of blood left on the field as on thewooden
floor covered in Roman sand. QB1 is Texas’s favorite sexual position.
Jason Street’s memory of legs is based on a true story. In Dillon, they play
football sometimes. I already mentioned that. Always on Fridays.
I already mentioned that, too. Today is one
of those Fridays: Matt Saracen scrambling out of the pocket
before throwing the football to Tim Riggins, and it’s Tim Riggins,
gripping the skinned pig, who begins running toward the endzone, and
it’s Tim Riggins who keeps running past the endzone, running and
running and running so far he ends up in the future, in a memory
of where—in the Midwest stuffed with cheese—Aaron Rodgers takes a bath
in borax and calls Kyrie Irving to see if he’ll be at the next flat earth
meeting, since Kyrie missed the last one after accidentally locking himself
in a closet in James Harden’s beard, but Kyrie Irving can’t come
to the phone right now because he tripped and fell off the side of the earth,
and he is either flying or falling, it’s hard to tell, but it doesn’t matter
which because regardless, breath is hard to find, and as Kyrie Irving flies
or falls or something in the middle, he thinks about season two
of Friday Night Lights and how it got a bit off track with the murder
subplot, where the ugly Matt Damon, who don’t use tissues or his sleeve,
pushes a dead body over the bridge and into the river, and how even so, rocky
subplot and all, it was still a solid season, just like the year Kyrie
could’ve had if he’d just bit his lip as a nurse stabbed him with a needle
the size of a needle.
Leigh Chadwick‘s debut poetry collection Your Favorite Poet is currently available for preorder from Malarkey Books. Her poetry has appeared in Passages North, The Indianapolis Review, Identity Theory, and Hobart, among others. She can be found online at www.leighchadwick.com.