New Poetry: Training Camp
Title: Training Camp Author: Christopher Lowe
I was no quitter.
Heat-stroke, a heart-condition.
Still, you listed me
With the other washouts,
Boys too slow or soft
To make it through
Your camp.
It was a show.
To teach the others
The price of exhaustion,
The price of pain.
At our two-a-days,
You hounded us
Like some frenzied cleric,
Preaching a gospel
Only you understood,
Though we huddled
Like disciples,
Fingered our chinstraps
Like rosaries, muttered
The names of plays
You’d drawn up,
As though reciting
Some vague benediction.
When you told us
Of the quitters,
I sneered, secure
In my own strength,
Until the day I dropped,
Weighed down by
The muscle you helped
Me chisel free of the flab.
I wonder what lies
You told yourself that night
In the coaches’ office,
To justify that brutality,
To take a boy’s name
And abuse it so rudely.
The last indignity,
Renaming me one of those.
That year, our team –
Your team – went undefeated,
Ran through the playoffs,
Beat Millport and Southbank
And Reform. I watched
Each game from the stands,
Where my heart raced
And thrilled at each
Missed assignment,
Silently wishing that
The team could be
Something other than
Perfect.
Grown now,
Heart still weak,
I find myself return
To those oven-hot
Days. I tell my child
About the feel
Of drenched cotton
Over hard, molded plastic.
When I speak your name,
Why isn’t my voice
Hard with spite?
Why doesn’t anger
Coat my words
Like a sheen of sweat?
When I say, Coach Ledbetter
Was a hard man,
Why is it with the reverence
Reserved for a harsh father,
One who casts his son
Out of some terrible Eden.
Christopher Lowe's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Bellevue Literary Review, Fiction Weekly, New Plains Review, Zahir, and War, Literature, and the Arts. His collection of short stories, Those Like Us, is forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin Press.
