by Rob Greene
When I was six Larry Holmes was my favorite
before he took an aging Ali down,
punching Ali and punching Ali
while telling the ref to stop the fight
similar to the time my overworked airman father
punched me in the face
when I went over to hug him goodnight
while he was busying himself in between
swing shifts by taping his vinyl records
until one skipped a beat
when I opened the stereo cabinet glass.
Those were the good days, the days
when I took his best punch and got up without crying
just like Ali took Holmes’s best.
That summer I made a kite during a short stint
in the Scouts, a paper kite with my drawing
of Larry Holmes and my dad on the back facing skyward
in repentance to the Alaskan sun.
Rob Greene is the editor of Raleigh Review and he is a doctoral candidate and postgraduate researcher with University of Birmingham [United Kingdom] as well as an assistant professor at Saint Augustine’s University in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has a recent poem in the Berlin based annual Herzattacke, and others in Poem of the Week, Open Minds Quarterly, Great River Review, and WLA: War, Literature & the Arts. Greene relocated 46 times prior to moving to Raleigh close to two decades ago.