Day 157 | December by Michael Miller

December
Michael Miller

I want to be a passenger

in your car again

and shut my eyes

while you sit at the wheel,

awake and assured

in your own private world,

seeing all the lines

on the road ahead,

down a long stretch

of empty highway

without any other

faces in sight.

I want to be a passenger

in your car again

and put my life back

in your hands.

Day 106 | Slowest Member on the Junior Varsity by Michael Miller

Slowest Member on the Junior Varsity
Michael Miller

The first to arrive when the sleepy-eyed coach

   grunts good morning and undoes the rusty lock,

       he starts each day facing the water alone—

the shimmering skin over the cold deep end

    holding the calm of sunrise before his mind

       bellows start. He plunges in to tame the water

before the water tames him back—cutting meat

   and treading at the Y each weekend only keeping

       the pounds in place. On the deck stool with

his fake leg stretched before him, the coach rasps

   his creeds from the Navy. There’s standing tough

       and moving tough, he tells them. Whichever one’s

tougher, that’s what you do. On the cold mornings,

    the slowest tries standing tough, his feet buckled

        in at the water’s edge and every still joint its own

heady fix. When he moves, he moves to reach

   the finish line. The team is mired in last, not quailing

       from the season’s end the only victory left. All around,

hungry, he eyes the greater meets: the varsity team

   that shreds the water twice as fast, the seniors’ cars

       and flaunted car keys. Is every test decided

by the one before? Do the mind, the joints ever forget?

    He stares down the water, his body cold and primed

       for the tournament, finals, anything assigned.