Two Fables About Amateur Basketball

Hardwood

Players line up as kids flood the risen floor like confetti. Lenses sprout in the teeth of embrace, illuminating sweat stuck to foreheads, a tide of surface fish hiding in sunlight.

 MORAL: Court stormers ride the squeeze of bodies to the rafters, facelessly grazing players passing in the piling.

Asphalt 

My torso screwing into blacktop behind a full court heave rising threatening to sail over the hoop over the fence over the lot like a well struck baseball, hips rotating to a topple like I over swung a bat and neck whiplashed down as every ounce of force must get rung from my adolescent body to reach the rim 

MORAL: Stabilized, I watch bounces clump to a roll in the shadow of the rim and swaying chain.

Alex Wells Shapiro is a poet and artist from the Hudson Valley, living in Chicago. He reads submissions for Another Chicago Magazine and Frontier Poetry, is a co-founder of Exhibit B: A Reading Series presented by The Guild Literary Complex, and mentors with the PEN America Prison Writing Program. His work is recently published or forthcoming Blood Tree Literature, The Tulane Review, Boudin, Pangyrus, and Digging Through the Fat. More of his work may be found at www.alexwellsshapiro.com.