But you can lace the batter with cardamom
pod, crystals of raw sugar, a drizzle
of dark molasses.  You can track
miles and months on each engineered
footbed,  transfer the strings from old shoes 
to new, threading the past into the future.

You can stockpile spirit before each race.
Promise to calm your gun-start adrenalin, 
discipline your pace.  You can refuse 
the chemical goo, gels, and wafers against 
bonking-- instead eat another slice of cake,
this one from almond flour, peanut butter,
your own flock’s free-range eggs.  
 
You can want world peace more than 
an age group win. Your heart can beat
in waves and fits pushing some serum 
of iron-rich sumac into your chaotic 
nearly anoxic cells. You can recruit new 
muscles, beg them to twitch fast or
slow, as you memorize mistakes.

And though you can’t have a clean heart or be
free from ego, with each mile you can find 
a holiness in exhaustion. You can see
something shiny and pure in the fiber of
possum hair, the greasy stain left on the
edge from a car- kill.  You can read a secret
code in the back-bones and teeth scattered
over the road, charms from your mom’s
broken bracelet. You can send and you can take.
                        

You run in pre-dawn dark, vague moon overhead,
cratered ovaries spit race enzymes.
Fifty-mile-weeks- on spongy footbeds
pound porous your bones. You repeat hill climbs.
A charm of finches gorging thistle serenades
each crescent regret you cycle within.
The raw stench of cow manure and piss sprayed,
then held in factory lagoons unpins
family farms, rural charm, once unparalleled.
Your feet go on moving, sweat gritty with mistakes.
You arrange words, fracture stanzas, compelled
to interpret the roadkill, its rib cage bleached opaque.
Acid rain etches each infant tombstone.
Day breaks, lines fade into our pocked ozone.   

Published in Wisconsin People and Ideas Magazine 2018