If Life Were Like Touch Football

Driving north on Route 2A
from Vermont to Maine
listening to the news:
—the New England Patriots coach was caught
trying to videotape the handsignals of the New York
     Jets—

I remember how we six sisters
would recruit a few boys from the neighborhood
for a pick-up game of touch football in the street,
how we'd break into teams,
huddle around whomever was chosen to be quarterback,
how the qb would extend her left palm, flat,
into the middle of the huddle,
plant the index finger of her right hand in the center of her
     palm, and then
with finger motions and whispers,
she would diagram who was to go where and when,
in order to so confuse and fool the other team
that one of us could break free
and go long.

Oh that feeling
of running as fast as I could
extending my arms, my hands, my fingers
as far as I could
watching that spiraling bullet of a football,
reminding myself:
if you can touch it,
you can catch it.
If you can touch it,
you can catch it.

—Julie Cadwallader-Staub lives near Burlington, Vermont, and currently serves as the Grants Director for the Burlington School District. Her poems have been published in several journals and included in anthologies. She was awarded a Vermont Council on the Arts grant for poetry in 2001. She and her husband, Warren, were married for 23 years until his death from multiple myeloma at age 49. This poem is excerpted from her first collection of poems, Face to Face (Cascadia/DreamSeeker Books, 2010), a poem which was also featured on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac.