weighted raze i got the bench and bought my own body weight in cast iron plates when i was a teenager trying to wrest tenderness from the hollow hull of something i couldn't get my arms around. at least three nights a week i would crank up the loudest, ugliest music i owned, and i'd lift as much of myself as i could until it hurt to breathe. squats. bicep and tricep curls. chest presses. deadlifts. i didn't change my diet. i didn't bulk up. i didn't slim down. i was so skinny already, if i lost any more weight i would have disappeared. i never got the washboard abs i wanted. all i really gave myself was an outlet for some anger that didn't have anywhere else to go. and that was enough. at least for a while. once i sat at the edge of my bed and the mirror growing out of my dresser like a neoplasm let me see ripples in my bare back i didn't know were hiding between my shoulder_blades. and once i felt my stomach burn when jordan mancini made me laugh with his dead-on impersonation of mr. curry. he said the trick was making his upper lip scarce. i said goodbye to the straight bar and the curling bar and all the weights two weeks ago. after i scrubbed away most of the surface rust, a man with a chest twice the width of mine paid me more than i thought i'd be able to get and loaded half of my stillborn high_school dream into the back of his car. one of the outer collars was wrapped in white webbing when i brought it upstairs. a tiny black spider climbed down from the hammock it made and walked across the kitchen floor. i haven't seen it since. the bench hung on until yesterday, when someone named for something i eat sometimes on sunday nights in the dead of winter took it off my hands. he had a shaved head and an easy smile. he wore black sweats on a day that demanded shorts and short sleeves. his adolescent daughter rode shotgun in his white pacifica. she was too busy texting to say anything. now it's gone. all of it. it's a little strange to see an empty space in the basement where all that rubber and steel and smelted metal used to be. but none of that shit was ever going to fill what was missing in me. i have other ways of making myself strong now. 220729 what's it to you? who go blather from