A place for stories about chronic illness, disability, mental health, and neurodivergence.

Karsten Warholm, Men’s 400m Hurdles Final, Tokyo 2020

By

Pressed on the track he is tense
as the bicep holding my phone
while I’m held by ripples of poly-cotton.
He’s cool as the other side of my pillow,
shocking as an overloaded socket.
The gun clatters through my chest
and Warholm starts as if grazed
by a spider.  I lie here in sour sheets
while his pixelated body clears barriers
easy as falling asleep.  And I’m thinking:
what a life – to sprint the loop of his days
worried just for the weight of medal
round neck.  The pundit’s iambic din
hooks me to the final bend where his threat
is to look straight on and dip one shoulder.
The home straight is a torrent of lactic;
the line a threshold to eternity.

Contributor

  • Matt Alton is a disabled writer living in Manchester, UK.  His poems have been published in Under the Radar, Ink Sweat & Tears and Broken Sleep’s Masculinity: an anthology of modern voices, among other places.  His film-poem Brighton, Unfinished was commissioned by Apples and Snakes and is available on YouTube. A fairytale-essay hybrid, working through how to tell a chronic illness story without ableist tropes, was published in Disabled Tales.