Using Your Body to Protect the Ball

Okay—now that the cosmic 
game show is over and 
no one kept score we 
mistook the sunrise for a 

god the salt air and 
thunder too we're puzzlers in 
the void no pieces fit 
snugly so we group like 

colors or patterns we're living 
a mess day by day
a god who designed it 
needs a salad bar of 

antidepressants and a conga line 
of prostitutes that'd be a 
start death is the joke 
and the masturbating mutant that 

moans into his pillow when 
he makes an old woman 
slip past reason when he 
grunts into his pillow as 

a child dies without so 
much as living one good 
day in this hell hole
dropped see-saw like into 

oblivion when Future steps off 
and out for a smoke
one more cold stretch of 
highway the wind in Death's 

teeth the diseased bloody grin 
of the god who makes 
young people in love splatter 
themselves across blacktop with 

a little ice and a 
thigh touch tingle at speed—

yes, but just now my daughter poked her head in the door, held out her purple soccer ball, and said, "teach me some more" and I showed her how to protect the ball with her body, spin into the enemy, feel him with her back, because it's not her he wants, but what she's got, all the while moving, the ball an egg, the future, wait for him to advance a leg to one side, then hook into it, burst full speed past him, because it is not him you want, but the net there, right there, and drag the ball with you to the green wide open and let her rip

—so it turns out I 
don't have time to finish 

the poem about oblivion and 
death but I was sure 
I figured out how we 
can live with some dignity 

despite the brutality that's why 
people still read poetry right? 
because it's not me that 
oblivion with a handful of 

shirt and raking cleats wants 
all of this the purple
ball the green wide open
this pen and this paper

Bill Gillard is a teacher of creative writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. His writing has appeared in dozens of journals, and he is the author of the poetry collection, The Vade Mecum of the True Sublime, and two chapbooks, Ode to Sandra Hook and Desire, the River. He is co-author of Speculative Modernism, a study of the origins of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He is the fiction editor at the literary magazine, Masque and Spectacle. He earned an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Bill is a recovering youth hockey coach and lives in Appleton, Wisconsin, with his wife and two daughters.