Poem for Saturday and Mewtwo Capture

Chess
By Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Exactly four different men have tried
to teach me how to play. I could never
tell the difference between a rook
or bishop, but I knew the horse meant

knight. And that made sense to me,
because a horse is night: soot-hoof
and nostril, dark as a sabled evening
with no stars, bats, or moon blooms.

It’s a night in Ohio where a man sleeps
alone one week and the next, the woman
he will eventually marry leans her body
into his for the first time, leans a kind

of faith, too—filled with white crickets
and bouquets of wild carrot. And
the months and the honeyed years
after that will make all the light

and dark squares feel like tiles
for a kitchen they can one day build
together. Every turn, every sacrificial
move—all the decoys, the castling,

the deflections—these will be both
riotous and unruly, the exact opposite
of what she thought she ever wanted
in the endgame of her days.

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Three exciting things happened on Friday. The first was going out to breakfast with Alice at Bagel City and stopping in AC Moore, where we found Halloween decorations including glass pumpkins and Day of the Dead artwork. The second, which I found out after I got back, is that Adam was offered the internship for which he flew to Seattle to interview less than a week ago. The third was that I got to take my pass to the gym at the Sprint store in Montgomery Mall, where, along with over 50 people, many of whom I know from an online group, I got to participate in a Mewtwo raid, which my Mystic team won...and I caught Mewtwo!











The rest of my day was not as eventful, and I didn't even get the laundry folded, though I did fix a piece of jewelry that needed a charm reattached. I didn't get to hear Cassini's final flight till after the fact, though I guess due to the speed of transmission, neither did the scientists at JPL. We had dinner with my parents and saw the beginning of the Nationals game, but Things Did Not Go Well At All, and since the same could be said of the Orioles game and there was no college football on we really wanted to see, we gave up on sports for the evening and watched two Bones episodes instead. Happy Saturday!