I’d watch TV while my grandmother baked and roasted,

and today the wrestling was on: some guy

performing a knee drop onto another guy’s elbow,

 

held outstretched beneath him. It wasn’t that,

so much as every time he did,

the young man’s head bobbed up and down in agony;

 

again and again, that awful motion with his head,

as if affirming his pain each time those knees landed.

Bubba must have come in and noticed the hold

 

I was held by before the screen. I heard her suggestion

that we go outside to help my grandfather, up a ladder

with his old, blunt shears, hacking at the hedge. 

 

It wasn’t so much the violence I was watching for the first time,

but how hard I found it just to look away,

for all my distance from that tiny screen.

Live Encounters, May 2026