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enjoy this Kenneth DiMaggio writing in the free cc&d Tax Day 2011 PDF file chapbook Poems and Stories from The Blue Collar Book of the Dead				You can also order this as a 2011 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the cover spread for the book Poems and Stories from The Blue Collar Book of the Dead

Pugilists

Kenneth DiMaggio

Like a big leather cigar
or what we sometimes called
the 500 pound Tootsie Roll:
the punching bag in the basement
of an ex-pugilist grandfather
was the soft but impressionable
cenotaph where we tried
to leave angry adolescent
but untrained hands more dangerous
to the would be fighter
who may have been Polish
or Italian but who pretended
he was Ali
or Frazier in the decade
when White was flying
out of boxing the same way
it was from our clapboard
porch fronted tenements

and besides our gloves being
naked olive or pale ivory
they were also sometimes
female and because we teased
how girls could never
hit is why we never saw
Angela or Stephanie’s fists
when they attacked
this faded cherry pillar
which may not have taught
us how to box but did
let us discover how heroes
could come in other
colors and how toughness
was not always a matter
of the equipment
you were born with

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