JOE BETZ
Learning to Curse
If not for hopscotch
I might still be lost
in the parceled woods
of southern Indiana,
but the blacktop called
like cardinals flushed
from elderberry bushes,
that yip of dangerous
surprise, when your
own one-legged
flight was enough
to convince you
that gravity was broken here,
apples fixed, sickening green,
in the trees half-shading
the basketball court, forever.
And today I think of them
bunched in knots, imagine
my arms, long enough now
to cuff the lowest limbs
and test stems that remain,
even in dreams, invisible,
and the memory of boys
older than me with wrists
thick as my neck, punching
the basketball into a confusion
of leaves to break our story,
until giving up, done,
they said, with our bullshit.
128 The Paris-American
If not for hopscotch
I might still be lost
in the parceled woods
of southern Indiana,
but the blacktop called
like cardinals flushed
from elderberry bushes,
that yip of dangerous
surprise, when your
own one-legged
flight was enough
to convince you
that gravity was broken here,
apples fixed, sickening green,
in the trees half-shading
the basketball court, forever.
And today I think of them
bunched in knots, imagine
my arms, long enough now
to cuff the lowest limbs
and test stems that remain,
even in dreams, invisible,
and the memory of boys
older than me with wrists
thick as my neck, punching
the basketball into a confusion
of leaves to break our story,
until giving up, done,
they said, with our bullshit.
128 The Paris-American
Joe Betz is an English instructor at Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington, IN. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 2010. Recent poems appear in Anti-, Portland Review, and Natural Bridge. He hopes you liked his poem. His wife chose this picture.