Tribal Warfare, or The Wrestling Tournament
by Kathleen Williamson
The small boy lunges, grabs his opponent’s ankle,
flips him on his back. His father rasps, Fuck yeah.
Fuck yeah, he says again, his fingers pressed against
damaged vocal chords, the cost of constant encouraging.
My fingers touch my throat in twisted solidarity.
For the entirety of the next match, a mother
kneels on the edge of the mat shouting
Anthony, Anthony, Anthony, over and over again —
her voice a jackhammer, no action on the mat
changes her inflection. The coaches sit back,
unable to make themselves heard over the mother’s
insistence. She only ceases when her son is helpless
on his back. We’ve been in this windowless gym
for half the day already. The boys’ faces are rubbed raw
and they look hungry although they’ve been eating
since weigh-in. We sit in the bleachers with our team,
their bags and coats and food wrappers strewn around us.
Some sleep on the steps. They smell like antifungal cream.
Sometimes they’ll add their voices to the cacophony,
Go inside! Shoot, Shoot, Shoot! Just as often they’ll play
games on their phones. A few pull their singlets down
to show off six-pack abs and flirt with the few girls there.
Our team’s 119-pounder won’t wrestle today. Claims he was
concussed last week. When the referee asks where the boy is,
our coach says, Out with a vaginal infection, and his wife sniggers.
During the next match, she lambasts the opposing coach,
her voice piercing the racket. She experiments with different
insults and settles on Midget when she sees the short man grimace.
Self-satisfied she continues the tirade, Midget, Midget, Midget.
We sit still and quiet, unwilling to exchange a sidelong glance.
If we dared speak, we would have said, We’ve got no dog in this fight.
But then our son takes the mat and we rise together, fists pumping.
We have not voiced this, but deep in our hearts, we wish harm on the other
beautiful boy on the mat. We shout our son’s name again and again.
Kathleen Williamson’s chapbook Feather & Bone was a finalist in both Poetry International and Slapering Hol chapbook competitions. She won runner-up prize in the SLAB poetry contest and was a winner in the Poetry in the Pavement project in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Her work has been published in Ponder Review, Newtown Literary, and Lunate as well other literary journals. She attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and takes classes at Sarah Lawrence College. After spending countless hours watching her son wrestle, she wrote a young adult novel about high school wrestling and published a short story about that subject in Inkwell Journal.