I must bury the boy again,
who leaps into my limbic system.
My tongue. My eyes.
My spine and violence. I dream.
He rises lithe and running
the blue bermudagrass,
still bent on breaking tackles
his legs whip the earth
toward a wall of boys salvaging manhood
from their bell-rung skulls,
helmets drumming bruisemusic
into the echo chambers of their abdomens,
blood percussion in his stomach,
he runs with a fist in his chest,
fathers’ and coaches’ mouths
punch the air, shouts grown
into a thicket, limbs tearing,
and more terrible the deeper he goes
breakneck through thornbush and underbrush,
branches glancing off his facemask—can’t breathe,
he spits out the mouthpiece, rips off helmet,
pads, girdle, cleats, and socks, and runs
until he’s in the clearing, nude
amid the orange poppies I left littering
the softened topsoil of his grave. He digs,
until I feel his hand in the dirt
until he lies lean against
this battered spine and neck.
When he sleeps, I wake,
aching where he’s buried.

MATTHEW WILLIAMS is a teacher and poet from Sacramento, CA. He earned an MFA from NYU and received a Galway Kinnell Memorial Scholarship from the Community of Writers. His poems are forthcoming from or have appeared in Blood Orange Review, The Banyan Review, California Quarterly, No, Dear, Pangyrus, Switchback, Dryland, and as part of The Center for Book Arts Poetry Broadside Series. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for No, Dear and lives with his husband in Brooklyn where he teaches in New York City public schools.