Kelly Magee
Throwing Questions
At the parent coach conference
the two most muscular women
I’ve been this close to ask
if I have questions. I do not.
They speak of getting and landing
and throwing and casting. Bungees
would help my daughter’s air
awareness. I don’t know what
that is, nor a mat stack or a snap down.
I have questions, actually,
that I won’t ask, like what is
a no hold requirement and the difference
between a glide kip and circle skill,
and remind me what a kip even is.
Which is the tap flyaway and which
is the cast. What is a salto.
Is a whip on tramp what it sounds like.
My daughter interrupts her coaches
to correct a point: I don’t have
my standing back tuck. They say,
It counts if you have it from the board.
I nod and agree, of course of course.
Later, in the car, she tells me,
At some point you have to just throw it.
I think this means jump, like literally for her,
unable to see where your feet
will land. They call it a blind skill,
the mid-air calculus of gravity plus body
plus thin strip of beam or bar. Whatever
they call it, the skill is only and utterly
her own. My daughter, the coaches
began the conference
by saying, is very coachable.
Layover
The sound of suckling woke me.
Nearby, new parents, a fussy baby,
and not the first airport nipple
I’ve seen, but seeing me awaken
sent them skittering away. My children and I,
our own little pride, lolling under
potted trees, fluorescent lights like slit
lamps bearing down. Behind us, the rise
and fall of the first flight, time mounting
itself, plane bobbling
through the jet stream. The maddening
suppression of urge: to kick,
pee, scream. Me in the middle seat,
sandwiched between kids who spread out
and colonized the armrests. Then here,
which is still not there yet. Between gates,
between zones, somewhere in North Carolina.
Someone else’s baby like a throwback plot,
disturbance of pleas I’m helpless to soothe.
My children sleep, flung
from me, heads thrown back, mouths
agape like they, too, are shocked by how
far they are from weaned. Two large
birds, folding and unfolding, sprawling
and spilling over, limbs askew. Bodies
like monuments to childhood. I’m merely among them
now, a position I fumble because the holding
of them is all mixed up in the release. My love
has turned into a tantrum of demands: be children,
for fuck’s sake. Fill up on crackers, scale counters,
clap. Stomp in squeaker shoes and be inconsolable.
Enough with the hair dye and the appetite.
Though I understand about time, I never
expected it would be my children
who would dare to take
my children from me.
Kelly Magee is the author of the story collections Body Language and The Neighborhood, as well as several collaborative books of poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in Granta, Gulf Coast, Triquarterly, Booth, Kenyon Review, and others. She teaches creative writing and queer studies at Western Washington University.
