It was so big a body could fit inside, two bodies, even.
The blue doors opened like an armoire’s, and inside
a whistle hung from a red lanyard. There was a single
gray T-shirt with a hole where the tag should’ve been,
and when he hung it, the T-shirt, it was like passing
a hook through the mouth of a fish. Bolt cutters
and a bag of footballs smooth as polished boots.
Inside the right door was a photo—two facing pages
torn from a magazine and taped down the middle.
In full-bleed high resolution was a man in the moment
he is tackled at the knee, so his knee disappears, the leg
no longer a leg but bowed like a parenthesis,
the impact of the helmet as it shattered the limb past
the body’s understanding of pain, past the ecstatic,
the stadium light shimmering in the drops of sweat
on the man’s forehead, none of them falling but held
in place on the door of my father’s locker. No photos
of us. A Popeye cartoon cut from The Post, a mirror
for combing his hair, and this photo that he looked at
each day before washing his hands and walking the stairs
up to the empty gymnasium.