The Ruling On The Field

for AJW

I’m forgiving the money I loaned you,                                 
my lifelong homie. Late on your alimony,
$2,400 in the hole, you’re poised to forfeit 

joint custody of your boys. Awarded                                                   
points for intuition, our high school minds’                 
eyes hawking danger through face mask                                           

cages, predicting missed assignments,
blindside hits, we scoped opponents’                    
blitzes with peripheral vision. Fast                               

forward to this: buried deep in my territory 
by my wife’s fight to live, I punted our son              
to your gym, where you ran interference,                

lifted his injured spirits, an unrequitable                 
debt I owe you for coaching him to cope.                                                  
Death by cancer, divorce court grant us                          

no quarter, cut us in gauntlets haunted                              
by uncharitable ghosts rearming dark 
shadows. Our only hope, my man,               

is to heal at time’s rate of interest. A loss 
of down, distance. The cost of enduring 
what broke us, those calls that stand.

Erik Roth played flanker for Colgate University, where he received a BA in English before earning an EDM in English education from Rutgers. He is the recipient of the Journal of New Jersey Poets 2025 New Jersey Poets Prize. His poems and non-fiction appear or are forthcoming in the American Journal of Nursing, Months to Years, Creation Magazine, Discretionary Love, Modern Haiku, and Educational Viewpoints. He lives in Bergen County, New Jersey.