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      August 22, 2018CalisthenicsLaura Kolbe

      Hold your own hand. See how you can
      crinkle or stretch it, add years or pull them off.
       
      Mystic tango, rubber bracer, tourniquet
      of time point unverified. Those are starter words.
       
      Look past the frozen garden to the woodpile—
      how like a hand, hot-burning irresponsible
       
      pine, silent stacked and tarped. Run to the mailbox.
      Run back. To hear a voice, speak or count.
       
      Mystic tango, iron weight plate, time point
      missing—Call your muscles by their names,
       
      hidden comrades, make them miss
      the light you see—gracilis, adductor magnus,
       
      sartorius, teres—they all adore you terribly,
      like bramble that hopes for your white ankle, like sand
       
      that follows you years off a beach. Hold your own hand.
      Run past the mailbox. Skip the letters.
       
      What could they say? Carry dumbbells.
      Carry your legs. Your spotter is a brute and swollen
       
      cloud bearing wet snow and a way of marking time
      in ticks of lawn to lawn. It hovers, gives
       
      no help. Hold your hands. Control your breath.
      Iron weight plate, tango missing, respiratory
       
      tourniquet. Or court hurt and danger for
      the changes they will bring. Lift with your back
       
      and not your legs. Twist as you lift. Move without
      grace. Run to the mailbox and back, its empty curve
       
      a black smile or a stroke sign—too dark to say. Soon
      your lawn is struck-dumb sodium streetlight,
       
      the dusky yellow flutter helpless, almost shy
      as it leaves the rigid lamp. Hold your own.
       
      Missing missing. Time point time point.
      Weight and brace. Look past and hold.
       
      When your belly tightens and your hands
      twist up, you are a tree self-semaphoring
       
      in the first lone shock of night. Count back
      to human. Hold. Your hands meet above
       
      your head, and the cold they pull down creaks
      over you like a jersey made of bone.

      from #60 - Summer 2018

      Laura Kolbe

      “Before I became a poet and before I became a doctor, I became an athlete. Which wasn’t so very different than either of those—waking at four in the morning to train for track-cycling ‘nationals’ at the local velodrome, or later waking for the university cycling team and marathon team, I entered into days of laps and circles. ‘Repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise,’ as Elizabeth Bishop had it. Meanwhile, I was having all the same moods and experiences as any other young person, and I remember how strange and necessary it felt to engraft those feelings onto form itself, trying to distill them into pure power of the legs. This was maybe my first awakening to poetry: seeing how life could be transmuted into something other than itself, be it racing or language, and feeling the shock of accomplishing that change.”

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