Surgery by Matthew Milia

I approach my coach to tell him
The anesthesia wore off
And then a loose cough
Crackles accolades in spades
For me

So they pour us up to La Rosa Market
Maybe you meet us with the Taurus
And you park it there

The air is sweet with bare summer feet
And cucumber-scented hair
The sun is wetting heads
Of sweating girls
In pretty smells
It swells and swirls
Then wanes

And the surgical wound
Is twisted deep
Like the sheets on a summer bed
And I'm marooned
In the summer weeds
Behind Sylvan Lanes instead
And all the life behind Sylvan Lanes
It wanes till it is dead

Keego Harbor trailer park
Beneath my parents' Upper Room
They had one too
Pet love in the sweat of
Forgetful heavenly days
I got some Mackinac Island caricatures
Where my toothy youth decays

When we would take Orchard Lake Road
To the St. Mary's Fair
Your first cellular phone
And the tone of the blown-out speaker
Lying supine on the pebbly asphalt
Electrically whine through the trebly assault
As the sidewalk calk, yeah the fault-lines
Scuff your sneaker

Disposable camera prints
Leaning in the doorjamb squints
The figure of my dad
And the body he had
When he was shirtless and virile
He'd drive me to intramural
Or the soccer travel fear
A Chevy Cavalier
And though I was puerile
My comfort was near

I genuflect on the kindergarten rug
Where I chugged all my pure light
A clunky TV cart and the sunken eyesight
A sleepy-eyed departure of a dream

Now I'm feeling like a phony up at Kerby's Koney Island
And the parents tick in decades
And the pathos just parades its wickedness
So sad
All the love that we had
Dissolves to an abyss
Of summer ski-hills
Where my newcomer skills
Once skidded in wintriness
Till the kid crashed

And red-faced shame
Is the world's only aim
When my spoiled Christmas gifts got stashed
I could hear strange percussion
In the depths of the concussion
Like the fireworks that once splashed
In Sylvan Lake
Then some pungent summer deodorant
Forced me to awake
To my mother's laugh

Appears on Eternity of Dimming