Poetry Friday: Lisa Russ Spaar, God’s Gym
I’m having a little poet-jealousy of Lisa Russ Spaar’s Poetry Friday offering. Wish I’d written it. I always wish I’d written gym poems, promise myself I will someday, and love to read what other poets have done with the subject. Lisa Russ Spaar begins by taking us into her thought process for how the poem began, which I appreciate.
My evening commute takes me along a highway that could be Anywhere, USA — a rootless route of chain restaurants, box stores, motels, gas stations. One evening, stopped at a red light, I noticed that the “L” in the local strip-mall Gold’s Gym sign had gone dark.
I had one of those delicious negative epiphanies I can have, if I’m lucky, in such dismal moments, and as I watched the bodies moving and shaking behind the neon-lit plate glass window — a space strangely public and strangely claustral — I began to feel that thrill of the float of one perception over another, which is one of the ways I know I’ve got the germ of a poem.
Read the poem at Women’s Voices For Change.
