my mother said over the buzzer, especially because you catch everything weird,

and every whisker on my neck agreed with her

as my sister blocked the opposing point guard’s sloppy lay up,

my mother shouting Yeah, clock that bitch, the cramp in my descending colon

a warning to leave soon. I thought about Well, look at my wonderful example,

or an Irish goodbye. I thought about Chiron

being unlike other centaurs and his god siblings

busy afflicting one another, his care

for Achilles, how he probably knew and wasted no time

on unkindness. At halftime, the score tied, my mother white-knuckled

the bleacher, turned to my silence, Now what gnarling her face,

my left flank seizing. I’d always known my problems

held everything in stomach acid and spreadsheets

tracking symptoms and sex partners. Don’t act like you

don’t know what I mean. As if knowing

were enough.

Ben Kline (he/him) lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Author of the chapbooks SAGITTARIUS A* and DEAD UNCLES, host of Poetry Afield and Poetry Stacked, Ben's work appears in South Carolina Review, Autofocus Lit, POETRY, Rejection Letters, Southeast Review, The Shore, fourteen poems and many other publications. You can read more at https://benklineonline.wordpress.com/.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty (b. 1978) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. In October, 2021, she opened a solo exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA. In 2017, Gloves Off, a solo museum exhibition accompanied with a fully illustrated catalogue opened at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, NY and traveled to the University Art Museum in Albany, NY. Studio Visit, Rafferty’s first experimental monograph, was published by Inventory Press in the July 2022, and is available for purchase now.