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Challenge of the Week CXV
Implicit Association Test. Write about the very first thing that comes to mind. No cheating. We'll know if you write about the second thing, or the third. Fiction or non-fiction, poetry or Prose.
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apromptaday

Gymnastics Practice

Summers swallowed by 90 degree heat

7 & ½ hours a day, 6 days a week

13 years old, when I say I love uneven-bars

I mean radio play, same 5 songs

lungs crystalized with chalk-cloud air

(chalk: applied to grips, to grip the bars

grips: applied to wrists, to help protect skin)

scrunchie hair-tie, determined eyes

perfecting same routines – toe-point here

extended knee & shoulder press,

body balanced on a forefinger,

trusting feet to guide my land.

I take stalk of bruises left between thighs

count each rip burned into my palm;

quarter-sized blisters, on the bad nights

large enough to fear reaching for another hand—

will they leave, disgusted

by my decimated skin? manglings

of once pure flesh; my childhood, my time.

but the weightlessness. God.

the weightlessness &

how could I not need poetry,

after thousands of hours

with aching hands & a yearning to fly?

When I say I love words I mean

I love the chance to break my neck, & by this:

the miracle of every time I do not.

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