(with an image borrowed from Jon Bois)
I.
tweets magnify fatten into cavalries of bandwagon
fans betting on the rams
dads betting on the patriots
i’m betting on chronic traumatic encephalopathy
the nfl
released
a statement
on facebook
last summer
after some
doctor
scraped cte
off dwight
clark’s skull
it read:
angry adults called black men kneeling for the anthem
unconstitutional & we are so thankful that everyone is
currently focusing on that & not this terrifying & confusing
& not-as-important-as-you-all-think-it-is degenerative disease
that eats quarterbacks, that only safer playing rules can kill.
ignorant fans loved us in the 90s, when snowflakes didn’t
care how many concussions their heroes had.
since will smith—we mean bennet omalu—discovered
clumps of tau proteins on mike webster’s brain, we
have grown tired of discovering.
this disease you speak of made a skeleton out of junior seau’s
shoulder pads to teach boys to not hit so damn hard; this
facebook post should assure you we’ll look into it.
the centennial light is still going, so why kill this multi-billion
dollar machine? along with your devotion & money, we will
gladly accept thoughts & prayers on behalf of our dementia-ridden
ex-star running backs—we mean football elders.
II.
i can imagine the moment when the nfl we all
know ends, because it has become something
smarter than us, or we are all dead, buried in
our lucky sunday jerseys—while a robot from
that one episode of the jetsons is slinging bullet
passes toward the end zone, in front of swaths
of androids tweeting about it on phones made
from skin grafts of their metal asses.
can
you
still
hear
the
groans
of
dissatisfied
dallas
cowboys
fans?
no.
can
you
hear
the
clinking
diamonds
of
tom
brady’s
championship
rings?
no.
that will be the end.
signal lost.
file corrupted.
III.
the only super bowl i see here is a turf-covered gravy boat where the liquefied brains of swollen linebackers splatter around the edges of the grandstands hissing like oil on the rim of a skillet smoking like charred egg cerebrospinal fluid going through osmosis at halftime
i don’t know where the stadium lights end &
the morgue lamps begin, but the pigskin
glistens in every hand it lands in & hushed
voices tinkle like a chandelier on a
ceiling low enough to touch.
this place—where fatalistic bodies
compress outside of phone screens
& the arc of that golden boy’s
pass, a doddering ball under a gloaming
atlanta breeze, glides above galloping
receivers—shouldn’t be beautiful, but it is.
Matthew Mitchell is a Northeast Ohio poet trying to make his work as beautiful and wondrous as Vince Carter’s 360-Windmill dunk in the 2000 Slam Dunk Contest. Meet him at your local coffee shop (not Starbucks, because the aforementioned poet’s partner’s family owns a coffee shop and the aforementioned poet refuses to cross enemy lines) if you want to talk about how Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” is the quintessential pop banger. His work appears in, or is forthcoming to, journals like BARNHOUSE, Noble/Gas Qtrly, The Indianapolis Review, Barren Magazine, and others.
