As a former athlete, I certainly endured plenty of injury: broken toes, fingers, a leg, a shoulder, a tooth, concussions, muscle strains, and a couple of sprained joints major and minor in nature.  Some of these rear their arthritic pulse now, thirty years later, like vestiges of glory, imprints of youth stretched by time. Painful or annoying, but regal and earned.  But the deeper contusions, the slow bruise of a season lost to riding the bench, or a word said (or withheld) by a coach, the missing parent in the stands, those internal blows bloom to the surface at different times and with a different intensity throughout my life.

Injury is at the heart of our collection for ISSUE 8. There are pieces addressing physical trauma, both the emergency or the residual pain that follows. There are pieces that circle the collective injury of COVID, both corporeal and psychic. And there is work beating with that buried pulse, of injury more psychological than physical, the evidence of which shows up in our bodies and in our being years later.

It is this variety, this bruised matter specifically, floating in our veins, that  shapes our constitution and very nature. Our drive, ambition, our will, our energy, our compassion and empathy, our patience and temperament, our confidence, contentment, and indeed, our identity, all marked by the words said to us by that parent after a tough match, or the coach during practice, and the actions of a teammate in the locker room. We carry these injuries mostly unconsciously and struggle trying not to bestow them on our own children as they learn to throw, or have that meltdown on the baseline, or sit on the sidelines for the third week in a row. We feel them throb when we attend a contentious family holiday, sit audience to a city council debate, leave a comment on a social media post, or yell from the nosebleed section at a human being human, at his job, on the court. These injuries are replayed in our ugliest impulses.

Consciousness of these wounds usually happens later in life, when time and reflection is a higher virtue. Attention to and treatment of old injury is invasive and difficult, but it is the recovery from these blows that is where the valor lies–not in the impact but in the healing. The glory days are now, in our resistance to old patterns and behaviors. I imagine grown adults in letter jackets everywhere–embroidered stripes for “trying” and “most improved”, medals earned for our recovery, our ability to overcome, to persevere, to change, and to survive, clinking across our chests. In these cloaks of distinction we become our own better angels and feel whole in our bodies once more. Mindful of and compassionate for the work it takes to be human.

Meghan Maloney-Vinz

Managing/Poetry Editor

the Under Review