Kick Line
Steven Ray Smith
There is a boy in the kick line. Look!
Among thirty girls, a boy
kicking!
The stands wonder what licked him
so hard as to scare his deuce into the kick line. A boy’s
legs are the deuce. A girl’s are quads.
Will he become a man in a kick line still
trying to multiply his deuce by two?
The stands expect his face to show the deuce
and his kicks to look like dodging a licking
for an impertinent smile.
But his face is that of someone pleasantly considering
his biology mid-term as he re-organizes his locker.
The quads don’t fag him out.
Each kicks reaches higher than the one before it and beside it.
The gym floor claps
in shoe-four time. Raps
woofer over the thrashing
bewilderment of stands.
What used to be a girl is now a man.
Steven Ray Smith’s poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Raintown Review, Garbanzo, Prick of the Spindle, Bayou, The Broken Plate, Poetry South, Skidrow Penthouse, Meat for Tea, Stepaway Magazine Dogs Singing – A Tribute Anthology, and others. New work is forthcoming in GRAIN, American Anthenaeum, The Lindenwood Review, The Conium Review, Common Ground Review, The Cape Rock, Big Muddy, Writer’s Bloc, Slant, and riverrun. He is the president of a culinary school and lives in Austin with his wife and children.