Allison Collins

Allison Collins is editor of Upstate Life Magazine and a writer with The Daily Star and Kaatskill Life Magazine. Her fiction and poetry have been published in online and print journals. Allison lives in upstate New York with her family.

Your Shoulders

Your shoulders, the widest I’d known, now hoop your spine, that big body little more than casing, draped in the clothes of another man,from another time, another health.To see you is to know why they call it shell.
I knew you’d be diminished; spent the whole ride readying myself.I didn’t know the chair in which you sat – in which you now live – would have more shape than you.I didn’t know I’d find you watching a blank TV screen,because the buttons had bested you, again.Or that you’d call me by my mother’s name, and mean it.
Time was, you piled ten men in a Mustangand by 11, no longer a virgin, but a conqueror. Even then, you probably had that damn mustache.Stories, still, of that turquoise house and so many leaps from the roof into the pool out back. You were invincible, everyone knew,and with massive hands, black-lined, there was no thing you couldn’t fix.Except the families you peopled, but broke.
Before, every anecdote admiringof that glint, that incurable mischief.You were a wild one, they’d say, a bear. Now, you are recounted in sighs and damp eyes,rueful clucks meant to acknowledge this impossibility.
We are grieving you, though you haven’t left. You’re there, and not, in the plump-backed chair,fighting the remote.

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