Adrian Blevins’s The Brass Girl Brouhaha won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Blevins is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, a Bright Hill Press Chapbook Award for The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, and the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction. A new book, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, has just been released from Wesleyan University Press. Blevins teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Walking It Off Adrian Blevins Whenever I try to maybe just breathe           some appalling shit happens                        and I have to get on the couch and pretend to recover. Even when the trouble slows               I’m a lightbulb with a skull fracture,                             a brick in a way in a dumb-dirty river being lobbed by semi-kids in splashy shorts                and bobby pins. And yes being tossed                             wounds the poor viscera and no we should not be so self-important                as to think in the plural first person                             as yes we know we are not the protagonist of the story               or even a semicolon                            in the middle of a sentence about it as what really matters is America and her heartaches,               her girls on rollerskates. Yes the moon landing                              and yes the GDP. O Michael Jackson O Walter Cronkite O Natasha              Richardson: what was it like                            that last second      in the U.S. among us? Was there                    a rope to grab or was it a staircase of mist                              and did you climb to outer space or was it more like being knocked out              and carried into the woods                         and thrown into a ditch or should I imagine each of you wrapped                in receiving blankets after being                              milked and powdered or should I think up ants and other insects—          weevils—crawling your bodies                         and what do you miss the most? Your skin, your mouths, your          unique way of thinking with the radio low                         and you smoking at the ravine all hot and giddy or is it something more unspeakable             such as your glee with the speed at which                          you rose and flew I guess and left us ramshackle and lowdown and droning and loose?