Lou Gehrig’s Army


Some of us limped, and some drove motorized wheelchairs
in the graveyard, and those who had still had voices sang
“Amazing Grace,” and we were the graveyard army
searching for our tombstones, and one had a frog who kept rhythm
and one of us had an orange sneaker which she played like a saxophone.
We were slogging through mud because the sky was a wet sponge
squeezed over the earth, and some of us got to sloganeering: “Crips are
hip,” and “Not dead yet!” From the nearby highway our song must
have sounded slurred, and the orange sneaker brayed, but we were
thrilled just to breathe, and some of us wore diapers and pissed
with abandon when we found our namesake disease memorial,
and we gathered together, and some prayed, which is often reckless
for cripples and frogs.

Bellevue Literary Review, Spring, 2015​