Trampoline

after Gordon Parks: Untitled, Chicago, Illinois,
from the series Metropolitan Baptist Church (1953)

Losing form before
the everlasting a favor
of your kind owed not
to the beginnings
exempt from the ethic
of joy or those who
could not show you
the luxuries of pain
difference between
each dig at deep
tissue solved
by the therapist whose
wrist leads either
the moan or muscle
judgeless before harm
I keep on running back
to your office holding
the pattern of an old
future like ebony
at the base of the Taj
unmoved by the tens
place or pond propped
beneath me once I’m up
awake, I say, I’m awake
and the antennas, well,
they say less.

Read more from Issue 22.2.