Two Poems

Head Injuries in Hockey Under the floods, under a thu-thunking shoulder check, I turned a mix of mean and happy, chucked my helmet. Under my head flaps, cold licked my locks. I grabbed great gobs of jersey and wound up like the slinky arm of a pinball machine. This was Junior A, so vicious. If I have one regret, it’s that I didn’t land that punch—some wood finger found the collapse button behind my knees. There’s speed, then there’s this: the clock stopped. On the ice, some braintube turned inside out, I heard a zwupping pulse, like a sung voice rewinding, blade marks swooped like a negative laser screen saver. It roared louder than victory. I was seasick on the liquids from my face. Hey buzzer! I’m a sound wave, gamma rays, steam, a swarm of fruit flies—inexact, darting spots that bend magnification out of 1:1. All the light was there, but it was out of order. Buzzer again. Pause. I saw the chilled air as it was: chemical, macho, jelly. I was covered in it, thick as olive oil, no, caramel, no, peanut butter.   Frypan, Pepsi, Burnt Out House Cold rolled vacation car cradled us like a picnic, hurtling through swatches of night-knit panic. A radar in my child self zinged. The K-Car’s fur pet me, my eyes pitched over the door's plastic forearm, staring at a list of road. Tracheal tube into a throat of forest, machine-assisted artery to the rural, ur-commuter, cottager—it nearly orphaned me. In the gesture of pine, the scudded shuffle overhummed collisions vague but piling up of teens caught in each other’s teeth. It waits. Every stump, every boulder a jerky lurker under a frypan-Pepsi-burnt-out- house sky. The forest’s grin I dimly understood but shrank from. A kidnapper’s pillowcase we booted through like we were chased by dogs—every minute a roulette of steel chambers. Click, nothing. Click, nothing. This, from inside. From the shoulder, we were smoke, a raft on rubber rapids, a gated cage of tissue wind-wrapped, barely a walk-on part, headlights and sedan’s gawky cough a hump rising, falling, and, at last, blinking out.