Working Out
- Working Out
Maybe getting high was all about pleasure and impulsecontrol, but it's not as if it always felt good—not that time we snorted a handful of pills
pilfered from our parents' medicine cabinets. Anxiety,antidepressants, seizure medication. We went outinto the summer glare and found ourselves
studying the smear of what had been a cat. Hit by a car,sure, but it looked more fucked than that: its spinelike an unsheathed knife. Oh man, Dan said,
my head is floating over me. I'm just its shadow.Will I never feel that again? Now, when the road turnsthat empty-dark, I drive to the 24-hour gym
and raise cast iron again and again until my body stops.Even then it isn't the same. I wear my seatbeltthe whole way home. I wait for nothing at every light. [End Page 151]
Caleb Nolen grew up in Pennsylvania and Maryland. He completed his MFA at the University of Virginia and has received support from Blue Mountain Center and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, where he was a work-study scholar. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, FENCE, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.
