Your parents spend their pensions on a gym.
You practice thirty hours a week at ten.
You’re starving off your menses to stay thin.
A spine a web of stress fractures you bend.
Just twelve of you will make the US team.
You stick your landing on a broken toe.
Just five will walk on an Olympic beam.
A month’s rehab, dislocate left elbow.
A body wrecked requires the best of care.
Your mother with you, examination room --
he talks to her, his hands everywhere.
Does she see? More buried pain, years exhume.
What does it cost, sixteen years old, to fly?
On ground such price for sanctuary, sky.
Kristin Garth is a poet from Pensacola. Her sonnets have been featured in Occulum, Anti-Heroin, Faded Out, Fourth & Sycamore, Murmur Journal, Digging Through the Fat and many other publications. Her dollhouse chapbook Pink Plastic House: Three Stories of Sonnets will be published by Maverick Duck Press in early 2018.