Photograph by Tom McKinnell
Gold Metal Match, Ice Hockey, 1980
None of us was a team player.
We were rehearsing for something
no one remembers.
Somebody brought a boom-box.
Gradually we gravitated to the sounds –
puck, slap, cheer, indrawn breath –
pulling up cafeteria chairs, silent,
close-kit, with huddled shoulders.
Staring at the radio as if
the game really mattered,
or the weird sport, or our fears,
or anything that wasn't
fourteen of us together
as we had never been
and never would be again.
Jennifer A. McGowan’s latest pamphlet, Still Lives with Apocalypse, won the Prole Pamphlet Competition this year. She’s a professional calligrapher and illuminator, is disabled, and prefers the fifteenth century to the twenty-first.
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