Olatunde Osinaike
Planet Fitness
Enter claps of disrepair, the ruin of cool
in their explicit shocks of bone that bolt
instigating belief. Enter dead lifts of water
through water, the stretch that lowers the dark
bridge of my arm. Enter altos hoisted loud
and breaking as from news as from the pull
of prayer. Nine TVs unfit for a prophecy,
tuned to sitcoms, both gone and new. Pasts,
both gone and new. Sweat seems sudden
but it isn’t, isn’t it? Cautions for touch already
stamped on each shirt emerging from the diet
parking lot. No one who comes here comes
without a choreography they can perform
for ache. Thanking the shin for facing the incline
sore. Not even a mountain. I sit and rise from this
bench elapsing the rep, witnessing the festival
of calculated protein aware I arrived lazier
than my choice to consume what I shouldn’t
any longer, to vault the lie of memory above
memory itself. Bread, the hour before: what
my dearest invited me to detect from the rain.
A trouble with that, the shape of slow news days
which map the night’s omissions into stolen
segments. Our words, like drawstrings, more gone,
less new with exercise. We’ll be right back after this,
what the talk show adds before it goes to commercial
and comes back with more on placemaking. What a city
does to its listeners, perhaps one perk of leg day.
Olatunde Osinaike reads “Planet Fitness”
Originally from the West Side of Chicago, Olatunde Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet and essayist. Selected in 2024 as the Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, he is the author of Image + Likeness (Alice James Books, 2027) and Tender Headed (Akashic Books), which was selected by Camille Rankine for the 2022 National Poetry Series. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Literary Hub, The Slowdown, American Poetry Review, Obsidian, Wildness, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere.