The orthopedic doc I’d last week seen, for my eight-week check-up since being hospitalized, had said things were healing on schedule. That I wouldn’t need surgery.

Or that, given how tenuous my skin, doing surgery, penetrating my skin’s surface like that, could risk further complications.

That, in my case, though my bones were still compromised from all the roids I’d been on, getting all up in there and tryna fix em completely would fuck with my body’s larger equilibrium.

My skin had its plate full already, healing what it was tryna heal.

“So what you saying is…we good?” I said, taking a picture of the X-ray of my hips—my birth canal—when he wasn’t looking.

“Good as we’re gonna be.”

Instead of walking up 41st till I hit the tree streets like I usually did when mishing it out west, I cut through the baseball diamond out back the Market Street projects, along the fence that bisected it and Drexel’s athletic complex.

Sun all but dipped, elongating things.

Down the semblance of a path, way out in the outfield, leading into the projects proper.

Amidst all the rubble out back behind the project b-ball courts.

Along a felled telephone pole, playing the-ground-is-lava but also the-ground-is-trash-strewn, human-waste-covered, probably.

Holding on to the project b-ball court’s cage-fence the pole ran along, for balance.

Wanting to keep my diagonal, off-road route going, I went right, further into the projects, rather than along the left-bending entry-drive onto Market, given the latter would be a backtrack—the new gals were out on 54th, further west.

Cop-SUV posted at the project entrance, up on the grass. Maybe eying me suspicious, although I didn’t look.

Got spat out in back of the Aldi parking lot, Market and 44th, through a partially obscured, folded-up fence-gap I wouldn’ta seen had it not been for the trace of a path—bent blades made by shortcutters before me—in the high grass adjacent.

Taking it easy down the steep slope, into the lot, cane-step at a time.

This was the other side of the rectangle I always stuck to the same two sides of, I realized, spanning 40th–50th and Market–Cedar.

Was the rectangle’s central Z.

Gaining energy from these streets hitherto untraversed, I zigzagged from 44th to 54th, taking the one-ways and lesser-blown ones I didn’t recognize.

Keyed up off the Fuccboi chapter (Rittenhouse bars, last winter) I was typing into the Notes app on my phone.

Off the PBR I was merking out of a 16 oz. to-go coffee cup.

Off this new form—a bar at a time—I’d found that was flowing so seamlessly.

Texted V Walking down your ole man’s way! with a pic of a single-block street’s sign named the same as his patronym, that I’d never before walked down / seen.