so instead I just say,

I’m fine.

Fat at the Beach

At the beach,

boogie boards and sand shovels,

shirts and sandals

and towels in a heap,

and everyone runs to the water,

the sand kicked under heels.

I feel the way my body flops.

The freckled girl looks over,

runs next to me,

stares, points,

and says, Fat.

When I hear them say fat, I feel

naked

completely uncomfortable.

I slip,

fall back,

the front

of my black shirt

rolls up

my stomach,

exposed

fat,

the ribs

tucked inside

undulating rolls

of fleshy whale skin.

Silence lingers

in the sand.

It’s the stark,

sudden loneliness,

the no-pants dream

made real.

It seems to matter more now

than ever before,

a weight on my body

like a friend suddenly cruel,

like a bad word whispered

in a library aisle,

stupid, moron,

or the first punch

in my gut where I can’t

find my breath.

This new feeling,

a sudden and irrevocable

change because of a word

and a look

and a lifetime

of a feeling

that I never understood

until now,

where everyone else is perfect

and my life is different

because someone called me fat

and I am.

The Game

Pick and I

focus a lot on our game.

We started making it last year,

a new role-playing game

about the future:

charts and dice and drawings,

giant robots bigger than the Golden Gate

rise out of the ocean

to protect San Francisco.

We script the first aliens ever discovered,

life-forms, brilliant engineers

who talk to machines with their minds,

merge with humans,

eat radiation.

We fill walls with graph paper,

hinge the edges together

in tape and glue.

We calculate probabilities and probability curves,

argue about how-many-sided dice we need.

We structure character generation,

attributes, debate

the importance of charisma,

invent heroes,

plot cities and space stations

and underwater domes,

storyline after storyline

between humans, creatures, robots, and monsters.

We place a Dungeon Master’s Guide

in the center of wherever we work,

our inspiration, a shrine to Gary Gygax

one of the creators of the original

Dungeons & Dragons.

In school

we learned

to make a plan,

write it down,

so the work is real.

We linger in twilight

before the sun rises,

two boys with the world

in front of them,

making a choice

to be like brothers.

Pizza

Friday evening,

the lights in the town come on

in a slow flicker.

Families walk here to there for dinner,

and we watch the world happen

from behind the nursery fence,

rusted wire and rotted wood.

Pick and I notice

how many kids there are,

girls our age.

Near the nursery

there is a pizza place like a barn,

and we convince my mother to take us

the one hundred steps and buy us dinner.

Inside, the room is stuffed

like a breath being held,

the air is basil and pesto and bread.

We order an extra-large,

laugh about the day.

At the table,