by Diane Kendig
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| Illustration from Journal of Astrological Big Data Ecology: Premium source for made up science |
The Guardian begins with the obvious question:
“Why inject acid into your penis, and what are the health risks?”
If ever there were a serious misuse of the second person,
here you go. I won’t inject anything into myself, or,
as my sister said, when doctors ordered her to give herself
her own shots, “This is why I went into Speech, and you into Medicine.”
And actually, the athletes aren’t injecting their own, uh, organ,
because they are into Skiing and their doctors into Medicine.
Even for the men among us, though, says my husband, it's unimaginable.
Still ski jumpers go to great lengths and with hyaluronic acid, even further.
That is, they want their crotch at greater lengths for suit measurement—
which happens nine months before the games, so they get like a little
maternity ski suit, a tad larger, getting a slight lift, just 5% more surface,
but this is the Milano Cortino 2026. Competition amounts to centimeters.
The World Anti-Doping Agency is investigating. One urologist says,
the rarest case would be gangrene and loss of the penis.
No athlete has been willing to comment on that.
Diane Kendig is the author of five poetry collections. Her latest is Woman with a Fan. Her writing has appeared in Cider Press Review, Comstock Review, Valparaiso Review, and other journals. She ran a prison writing workshop in Ohio for 18 years, and now curates the Cuyahoga County Public Library weblog, Read + Write.
