Nathan Graziano

Sunday Morning in Middle Age

Before stepping into the shower I remember

a segment from the Nightly News where researchers

in some prestigious university discovered the number

of push-ups a man can do has a direct correlation

to the likelihood of developing heart disease  

so as the shower ran and the mirrors misted up

I hit the deck to determine when I would die,

my palms pressed to the tiles, my arms shaking.

If I could hit twenty, I’d reduce my chance of a stroke

by sixty-four percent, according to the researchers.

There’s no suspense here, folks. After ten push-ups,

I dropped flat to my belly on the bathroom rug, done.

A forty-three year old man, found dead in a bathroom

in his boxer shorts beside a toilet—an ugly obituary.

Nathan Graziano lives in Manchester, New Hampshire, with his wife and kids. His books include Teaching Metaphors (Sunnyoutside Press), After the Honeymoon (Sunnyoutside Press) Hangover Breakfasts (Bottle of Smoke Press in 2012), Sort Some Sort of Ugly (Marginalia Publishing in 2013), and My Next Bad Decision (Artistically Declined Press, 2014). Almost Christmas, a collection of short prose pieces, was published by Redneck Press in 2017. Graziano writes a baseball column for Dirty Water Media in Boston. For more information, visit his website: www.nathangraziano.com.