During the hotter half of the year when
healthy enough to play, we watch Aaron
Judge’s truck axel arms dwarf and lever

a bat, proportions stark enough to distinguish
peripherally from the kitchen while
I smoke and burn rice hand fanning fumes

in belabored flaps at the window to
distinguish among the pinstripes thru mom’s
sight clouding in and out her nerves

snapping in the quake of a truck
driver sleep fallen mid route swerving into
our passenger side door and spinning us off

the interstate smacking into a snow
bank packed dense like drying concrete to
distinguish on a shoddy hospital

desktop monitor tv thru static
bleeding onto walls gowns curtains bedding
the sterile white and metal my sunken pale

dad’s jaundice complexions cast alike as
in health while he waits for the dead to leave
a liver he won’t take from us living

to distinguish a looping pitch snapping
a syrupy angled slice hundreds of
feet the opposite way to distinguish

thick piled muscle propelling his action
from the frailty of his mortal structure,
skeletal and tendinous connections

unable to compensate for the force
he generates.

MORAL:
We text commemoration for any
hit, lucky or driven, recognizing
a fit, utile body as fallible.

ALEX WELLS SHAPIRO is a poet and artist from the Hudson Valley, living in Chicago. He reads submissions for Another Chicago Magazine and Frontier Poetry, and is a co-founder of Exhibit B: A Reading Series presented by The Guild Literary Complex. His debut poetry collection is forthcoming in Spring 2022 with Unbound Edition Press. More of his work may be found at www.alexwellsshapiro.com.