T-Wolves/Raptors, No; Micus Meatball, Yes

  Didn't catch much of the T-Wolves vs. Raptors game, which turns out was a lackluster effort for the Minnesota boys. Reason for missing the game: I was invited, with my family, to local poet Eddie Micus's house to partake in The Ol' Rattler's famous Meatball and Spaghetti dinner. 

  In lieu of any game write-up, I'd like to offer a recent photo of Micus along with one of my favorite Micus writings, a poetic piece of flash fiction entitled "YMCA."

    Micus reading from new work at the MSU MFA Alumni Off-Campus Reading, Las Fronteras restaurant, North Mankato, October 26, 2012. Check out his recent book of poems: The Infirmary.

YMCA

by Edward Micus

     They made us swim naked at the YMCA. We were six or seven years old or so, dozens of us huddled along the ceramic shore, a cluster of behinds. The water was more green than blue and a haze gathered above us, a primordial mist that trapped itself beneath the ceiling canopy. They would teach us to swim, make us into little four-oared boats with peckers for rudders. But some sea in us already knew who we were and we took to water like lemmings, bumping again and again into each other, so many limbs flapping about in that little pool.

     We tried to drown the weak. We squashed Leslie Morgan against the side of the pool until he hollered Uncle. We dragged Fats Logan to the murky depths and held him there, stuck rubber rings into his crack. We climbed on top of each other and fought two against two until the death or until our nuts were crushed against the necks of our partners. We crawled amphibious back to shore, slid along the slippery tile on our behinds, waving our arms and chanting the chant primeval. We stood in the warm shallows and smiled, little yellow clouds rising beside us.

     “I don’t understand,” our mothers would say, “why they don’t make them wear suits.”

     We knew things. We knew things our mothers might never know and those things made us stronger. Jimmie Geralk had a birthmark on his ass, the state of Louisiana. Justin Rail had no testicles as far as we could see. On the diving board Dutchie O’Dell’s pecker had a hook on the end. Tommie Anderson’s hid beneath a jacket of skin. And when we straddled the rope that strung the bobbing buoys between the deep and shallow ends, riding it cowboy, one hand waving the wetgreen air, a sensation crept though our groins, half pain and half pleasure, a kind of sex.