For Geno Smith of the Seattle Seahawks
Before I performed your spa appointment,
my daughter’s school counselor called
to give me a phone number
if my daughter had those feelings again —
a suicide hotline number.
Writing it down felt like a folding a billboard into my purse.
The way advertisement isn’t yours until you need it.
Your legs cleared the massage table by at least two feet.
I cried while scrubbing your dead skin cells.
You snored. I whittled away at your epidermis.
I prayed while rinsing the skin’s death down the five-star drain. This was the quiet, inside prayer, kept alive
by the motion of hospitality.
I know nothing about football
even less about sea hawks,
but plenty about self harm, which is why I tried to seize
the quarterback charge from your enormous wingspan.
Why I tried to tackle the stored up huddle in you, steal
your fancy footwork before the hour was up.
But I could not keep the whole of it inside my palms, held open
the same way I waited for her to be born, ready to catch an oblong future,
not knowing how we’d be so stitched with repair.
A quarterback’s aim is to throw
with power and accuracy. To make decisions in every play, to deliver
the ball to the receiver. After you left, I Googled sea hawks,
which I learned are technically ospreys.
Legend has it that if the fish looks up to see the bird’s white throat,
its dazzling carriage, the fish will mesmerize — surrender to the hawk.
As if the glow of God’s underbelly could make a fish seek the sun.
As if it could break the spell of water, risk the gasp of rupture,
touch down so urgently to discover
it could bear the adventure of air.