The Lost Boxer
sitting cross-legged
in the shadow of an alley’s mouth, his fists
named Patterson & New Jersey
his heart a starving ox, starlings in flock,
once found the boy clinging
to the Midwife’s body in the mud
behind a bowling alley on the Missouri,
resting geese white lamps on the river.
The man called Bedlam made a proposition
from behind the counter of a liquor store
where the boxer set a plastic pint of vodka,
his translucent
anodyne star.
Bedlam offered him terms
to spare the boy. The boxer accepted
that his heart would become a brown trout, famished
& mouthless in torrents of larva,
pointed upstream.
According to the terms
these are also what his heart became—
a gold monument to archangels in Valetta
an enduring record
into which everything that rises will redescend
the carnival dwarf, deaf as a photograph
lightboxes: small harbors in ice
for arctic seals
among the trumpets,
drums struck by a single red hand—
He vomited yellow bile
at the first of the boy’s cries.
& at the sight of the midwife’s surrender
went straight for liquor
to steady his hands.
The boxer traded his life, what little
he thought there to be left,
to rescue the boy
from a reed cluster
circled by black wings,
rosaries spiraling upward,
a twin-helix of birds
he stepped into,
that dove for the heart of the man.
Broken Saints
A Letter to the Midwife from the Boxer
The Lost Boxer
The Midwife’s Antinomy