My Little LeBron
For my nephew

Sunlight saunters in long, thin wires through the fallow field
of my bedroom. You approach, a migrating heron
in a runny yolk collar and suntanned shorts, a white-light emissary
of hope. Your nimble night eyes bore into me
like the world’s quietest MRI. I feel reduced
to translucent bone, confused as the shadows shifting
on the wall. The truth is uncomfortable, I tell him,
like wearing a scratchy wool sweater. The summer’s a terror for people
who can’t take it. We wander with no strategy,
no pot of gold, no plan for arrival. How we build houses
to live in, religions to believe in, relationships to love in,
but the primal apes in us know, long before we get born that nothing
abides. I like being alone with my mug
of pain to have something to look forward to,
to nurse. I don’t tell him any of this,
but he hears it anyway. He knows I’m beyond the rim
of understanding. He recites a poem he wrote
about baseball and a bucket list. How he wants to become
Tiger Woods, a chess grandmaster, grandfather a lot of kids,
live long past ninety, donate money, a liver, any piece
of himself to anyone whose needs are greater
than his own. Most importantly, he says,
gravity tugging tears down his cleft chin, he wants to stay
healthy. I clench my fist to give my body something
to do. He is only eight, undulating in the span of his rocking legs
like waves of roses we planted in the backyard.
He goes on about Pokémon cards, how he ate the gross beef stew
camp served on Monday, the chapter book he’s reading all on his own,
pride flitting in the sudden stability of his voice.
He tells me how he tilts his head back as far as it will go
like we did at planetariums to be sure God downloads his wish
for me to walk away from my wheelchair. I am at a loss
for what to say, to do, so I tuck my knees
into my chest, try to put a lid
on my jar of grief before it gives me away. It’s all I can do
to save my nephew, but he tiptoes near to latch
his petite fingers around my forearm and turns his head
upside down to find my hooded gaze. I stare up
at the crocodile on his shirt, hide
in plain sight. He sees the me that is a hoax
of light on glass, and back to when I was doe-eyed,
brave before memory. I tell him about evolution
before he had history to hook onto or a tire-swing
to thread himself through. How he was a tadpole
in artificially fertile skin, his shoots snapping the sidewalk
in tide pools of confetti genes, a wealth of turquoise veins
and a thousand cliques of stars silently spilling
his body’s secret. How his first layup happened
in a nimbus cloud, a heartbeat scored in bright hoops
on a technologist’s grey screen. How he was scooped out
like vanilla ice cream from miscarriages’ frozen-egg defeats
into an offense of ions running laps along axons.
Agar-alive in pulses of movements. An impossible puddle
of parts determined to go on, past white coats
carried by a chemist’s indifferent leash. How he became gelato
in Rome, seashells hurdling a body into free-swimming, a locomotive
caboose skinning its knees, a French accent, barbecue sauce outlining
his mouth into a metronome of checkmate. How he was born
to knowledge never learned in school, of the owl’s midnight time
and place, of the maggots’ wild goose chase.
He cows his soft skin, accepting more of me
than I am able to. I tell him how he moved from in vitro tubes
to a dollhouse apartment, its kitchen just two paces wide, its freezer jam
packed with microwaveable macaroni, its shelf of cereal boxes snug
as the high school corsage his dad set to dry
between pages of old yearbooks. I tell him how he is growing
into slam dunks on asphalt, spring sprigs of mint green.
How inside his heart there’s an entire galaxy of comets roving
the Milky Way. And how here, his face flickers
under my fingertips as he spins silk in the birdcage of my mind,
where I let my love fly beyond these margins in lists
for him.

Grace Lynn is an emerging queer painter who lives with a chronic illness. Her work, forthcoming in Superlative, The Ekphrastic Review, JAMA, Sky Island and other outlets, explores the intersections between faith, the natural world, art and the body. In her spare time, Grace enjoys listening to Bob Dylan, reading suspense novels and investigating absurd angles of art history.