Seth Pennington
Health
Health class is a coach missing both legs saying wear a rubber if you remember and reading the paper until we get out of hand and he throws the Gazette and it falls apart in the air. I’m still talking and he takes off a leg too flesh colored for camouflage and kicks me in the head with it and says, Pop Quiz: What STD will you die from? I stare at my desk. Here’s a hint: how do fags die? It looks like the embalming table where Dad works and like my body belongs there with clear tubes taking my blood to the urinal where he will flush it down. Coach’s favorite joke: “What do you call a man with no legs in the water? . . . Bob.” He asks me again how I’ll die but I just hear his joke running in my head and think wrong answer. I say, A man with no legs in the water, he’s dead.
Seth Pennington’s poems have appeared in the journals Assaracus, The Good Men Project, Upstart, and Toad Suck Review, as well as in the anthology Wingbeats II: Exercises and Practice in Poetry (Dos Gatos Press, 2014), edited by Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen. Seth is cover artist, editor, and co-publisher of Sibling Rivalry Press. Raised in the minnow farm capital of the world, he lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with his husband, Bryan Borland.