Jeremy Allan Hawkins

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the one with a bike and a lazy caesura

i know sugar        should be controlled
like enriched plutonium        on a cellular scale
especially if we’re talking        kids 
as in what they use to make more        of themselves
not really in terms of us trying        to make more 
of the kids        ourselves but in the meantime 
there’s a mail-order exercise bike       cheap enough
to transfer guilt        from what i ate to
what i ought to pedal        in the living room
and it folds away        ready at any moment
to topple with the comic        slowness of a poem
about samurai trees        too sweet for this century
and yet still always falling        which is perhaps why
i think of my parents        every time i tuck into
a new weight watchers meal        telling myself 
it’s different        without the meetings and pounds
without a weigh-in        i am boxing more
with time        available to eat healthy and still
respect the bike’s vocation        to wait with gravity
always still here        though we’re supposed to 
have made progress        have made it 
somehow new        rather than just making more
as in thigh meat        for the mail-order home office 
chair        waiting now upstairs for its turn to support
my end        like sugar or the reminder of strongmen
boxing with their parents’        diet regimen 
yes        this is the moment where i feel most topical

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JEREMY ALLAN HAWKINS is the author of enditem. (Beir Bua Press, forthcoming 2023), and A Clean Edge (BOAAT Press, 2017).