Basketball Retrieved Through a Barbed-Wire Fence
by Alejandro Lucero
for Steven Espada Dawson
For the sake of the unfinished game,
downhill from that dirt-patch court,
pounded smooth from decades
of double dribbles, the boy up by a point
puts his weight into the sole of his sneaker,
pressing the bottom wire as close as he can
to the sun-cracked earth, cheatgrass
and bull thistle overgrown around him,
him holding the other wire above his friend’s head
like the weight of a kitchen drawer
filled with a hundred metal spoons.
And he, the boy ahead, with more control
in this moment, thinks about dropping the wire
but knows teaching this pain will spoil the game
they started, which they love,
which they already are so close to finishing,
and anyway nothing he imagines matters,
for the other boy crosses too quickly
for this life-lesson to begin;
his friend’s body hovered,
in that moment, inside his kindness, and now
goatheads coat the ball, so the boys
stand face-to-face, plucking each thorn
to rediscover the beaten Spalding’s pebbled surface
they can now touch without fear.
Small rivers of sweat streaking their dusty arms,
and suddenly, once the ball’s picked clean,
the boy who crossed over snatches it away,
squinting the brightness from his eyes,
to shoot a hail-mary
for the win and almost sink it--
For the sake of the unfinished game,
downhill from that dirt-patch court,
pounded smooth from decades
of double dribbles, the boy up by a point
puts his weight into the sole of his sneaker,
pressing the bottom wire as close as he can
to the sun-cracked earth, cheatgrass
and bull thistle overgrown around him,
him holding the other wire above his friend’s head
like the weight of a kitchen drawer
filled with a hundred metal spoons.
And he, the boy ahead, with more control
in this moment, thinks about dropping the wire
but knows teaching this pain will spoil the game
they started, which they love,
which they already are so close to finishing,
and anyway nothing he imagines matters,
for the other boy crosses too quickly
for this life-lesson to begin;
his friend’s body hovered,
in that moment, inside his kindness, and now
goatheads coat the ball, so the boys
stand face-to-face, plucking each thorn
to rediscover the beaten Spalding’s pebbled surface
they can now touch without fear.
Small rivers of sweat streaking their dusty arms,
and suddenly, once the ball’s picked clean,
the boy who crossed over snatches it away,
squinting the brightness from his eyes,
to shoot a hail-mary
for the win and almost sink it--
Alejandro Lucero’s chapbook, Sapello Son, was named the Editors’ Selection for the Frost Place Competition (Bull City Press, 2024). His latest work appears in Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, and Waxwing. He currently lives in Baltimore, where he is an MFA candidate in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and a managing editor for The Hopkins Review.