I.

this is what we did:

II.

garbage bag undershirts for five mile runs
credit-card-scraping our teary sweat
in doctored stairwell saunas
heated for salt-road winters

mornings before regular kids dragged
their sleepy boots through halls
we—August winds—blazed the emptiness
until classes, kept our grayed eyes
open for Wednesdays, Saturdays,
whenever scales read our fortunes
and we reddened for six-minute
matches and concession egg sandwiches,
liters of Gatorade which blued-to-vomit
in the armpit locker rooms
of nowhere schools
highways from Hartford’s sunken valleys

those evenings we ate-and-drank
our blood-tummies balloon-skin taut
wearing matburn, eye-bruise, hoodies
to hide bottles and bodies-of-bones

III.

Will wrestled 152 sophomore year
when I was concussed to amnesia
and we all felt thinner, shredded,
lean less like starvation than strength
what’s a body for if not depriving
until these minds which know so much
begin to focus solely on bread, milk,
the ripe-fake smells of cafeteria pizza,
a euphoric epiphany of cookie
or an untimed sip of water fountain

a few days before States, Will’s diet cracked—
he blimped-up twenty pounds
up two weight classes
and cut 48 hours straight
to make that number his number
which was his life and home
which shrunk his vast brain to figures
as the standardized slate-black scale
bobbed digital red

must-have-felt years
down the icicled February street circling Secret Lake
years in sweats and trash bags
cottonmouth years
years the nights too-tired to sleep
too-sweaty to sit too-beaten to stand

though he made it, 152 for one lost match
and that night he threw it all back on
plus seven pounds—wings, milk, ice cream,
fluffernutters like a Savannah rain
his body the crumbling, suffocating earth

IV.

what a cigarette lull that scale
what a master that scale
a hypnotist, a parent,
an unblinking eye that scale

V.

we loved our abs, loved our ribs,
the veins of our softskin biceps
this was hard, we were hard,
our paperthin chins ivory-hard,
the banana-yellow piss
and laxative dinners hard

we earned our suffering
our sheer bodies, which on good days,
days with one meal,
felt a little bit like snowglobes
after the confetti flakes
settle on the glass