I cannot describe to you the smile on my face the moment Make it Rain came on. I must add it was not a moment when Make it Rain by Fat Joe featuring Lil’ Wayne typically comes on. I was not in a dance club with friends or controlling the TouchTunes digital jukebox with a strict ‘bangerz only’ philosophy in a neighborhood dive bar. I was totally alone, standing on a blacktop, a biting early winter wind rippling through the mesh of my shirt, headphones in my ears with an unending playlist of early-to-mid aughts hype songs all queued up, and the ball in my hands.

The headline doesn’t faze me, stretching
in my underwear and thinking of Rome:
the arch a hollow monument.
The local company that extracts blocks
for ice palaces in Saint Paul
built a small castle on our town beach.

Sneakers squeak on the wooden floor
as ten men, and boys becoming men,
huff and shout and surge toward one hoop
and then the other. On the flip side of the divider,
children create a cacophony of of ricocheting balls,
orange orbs bouncing off walls, backboards, rims.

The last time I walked anywhere
in a group was Halloween, 2019.
You were dressed as a baseball
player and I was a beat reporter:
three-piece suit and spectacled
with a panama hat and a flip pad
where I recorded your afternoon
quips punctuated by the popping
of double-bubble and Mom yelling
to remind us both to say thank you.

How I got my Cold War epithet
all started before the ’06 season.
To give back, Coach signed us up
to donate blood. Later that week the team
was expected to exercise its sympathy.
“Abstain and hydrate, boys,” he advised,
a few days leading up to the drive.

To the campus we could never afford, but crept through sometimes,
not on nothing nefarious, just hooping with a cousin

& his friends, & some boys who been spoon fed
since they were twinkles in an iris. I recall like yesterday’s

refuse, the way them White boys watched you climb so high
above their heads, just to shove you down at the peak.

“...because they are kind and almost meaningless.”

i tell him that i like the one with the skeletons playing
baseball: one skeleton batter, one skelton catcher, and
one skeleton umpire, calling a strike. he’s brought in his grateful
dead ticket stubs to show me, spread them out on a table in
the breakroom of the grocery store.

there’s never been another living in
the anthropocene like him. try it —
afraid to pay the fee of playing him
twice a year, jackson lit the candle
and locked the door. then the rest
got scared, the referees, david stern,
and a growing television audience all
tuned in for m.j., so they had to call
him “the worm.”

in baseball a pitch
thrown too far inside
is an invitation
to a fight
thrown just right
it is a merely a reminder
to quit crowding the plate

When I was 9,
I remember playing soccer
With a plastic black and white ball.

Always, at whoever’s house, teeth marks:
a chunk chewed from the stitches
or the side, the smooth N or F
we would worry with our fingers
before testing our strength against
fall’s yawning acreage, a Hail Mary
every down. Sometimes waterlogged
from a rain barrel or above-ground pool,
often scrawled with permanent marker
across the seam (nickname, lightning).

█ a post-game press ███████████████████████████ gesture ███ █████ ██ a message to fans ███████████████████████ poor performance ████ ████████████████████████████████████████████████ will not be tolerated.

We stand in the gloom of April:
pearls of ice, strands of snow,
entire necklaces dipped in heaven’s

Why is the crude swell
of nostalgia like
cresting sun and falling darkness
kissing?

Dad was a poet on the ice, carving commas with his skates and plotting long, arcing narratives from the blue line to the net. I watched him play in an over-thirty league one year and he still had it. I could tell, though, that his game had become an elegy for the past when he used to share the ice with his older brother who waited at the bottom of the page for that frozen rubber end stop to punctuate a plotline destined to fizzle into a fragment. Nothing could get by him––except opportunity. He joined the Marines the day before a letter arrived in the mail inviting him to try out for the Cleveland Barons.

Karl-Anthony Towns, center for the Minnesota Timberwolves, experienced unfathomable loss
in a span of months. His mother, Jacqueline Cruz-Towns, died from complications caused by
COVID-19 on April 13th, 2020. Subsequently that year, Towns’ family lost six more loved ones
to the disease.

The chair on the left if you’re sitting on the couch, in the living room, in the house my father shares with his partner, and my father asking me how I am since I stopped electroconvulsive therapy—I’m in that chair. I cast my eyes to the carpet; an inward turn isn’t always a retreat. Sitting on my left foot because that feels best, and leaning forward, and sometimes I can anticipate, but less often with his partner, and I say my mood swings have settled somewhat, and that the doubts I’d held about my spectrum diagnosis are extinguished, at last.

It was during a film class in my teens that I first watched Goodfellas. It was like nothing else I’d seen. Having studied the fundamentals of cinematography throughout the year, watching it was like a snapshot of what an exquisitely captured piece of art was supposed to be. Particular frames used to elevate the narrative arc, like Henry running out of the fire but the image illustrating a run towards it; optics and lighting that blur the audience's perception along with our protagonists; and needless to say, the infamous long shot that recrafted our understanding of film, tracking, and the possibilities that could be established in the visual telling of a story.

Consider the synonyms of loser, that two-syllable acidic stain on the tongue that we’re told is a label to avoid: also-ran, underdog, deadbeat, defeated, dud, failure, flop, has-been, disadvantaged, down-and-outer, flunked, underprivileged.

July 31, 2005, was the first day I believed I could become an Olympic swimmer. I was competing for the Meadowbrook Tomatoes in the 11-12 age group at the Central Maryland Swim League (CMSL) Championships, the big season finale for summer swim teams. And for the 100 I.M., I had to race against my former teammate, the evil Amy Halligan, a bulldog of a girl whose mouth was fixed in a permanent grimace. She was a professional at spinning her words to make me feel awful in my already awkward skin. But today, enough was enough. I had never wanted to beat someone this badly.

It’s the last game of our season, of my whole athletic career, although I don’t know it yet.

My tongue is thick and dry, chafing against my worn black mouth guard. I suck it against the hard roof of my palate until I feel the urge to gag. But I don’t retch. I’m too tired. The air here in southern Maryland hangs still and heavy over the Bermuda grass field.

Leon Cameron, Vice President in charge of Artists and Repertoire for the American division of a German music company, spent the evening at a dreary Carnegie Recital Hall debut of a mezzo who was being promoted by the manager of the label's biggest star. So how could Leon have turned down the invite? But the singer had programmed an evening of Hugo Wolf art songs, tough going under ordinary circumstances, which she delivered with what Leon called a "Head in the Toilet" voice - listening to herself, pleased with the echoes, wrapped in an aura of sainthood, eyes crossed so she looked slightly batty..

The catcher squatted over home plate. He was trying out, too. I’d driven three hundred miles for this opportunity, but my head stayed in small-town Iowa. I was standing in my backyard near the fence. With my feet stacked atop each other, I was walking forward and counting to sixty, drawing the distance I had to conquer. I dug my cleat into the mound. I dangled my glove. I dug my cleat again. And I waited for my superstition to come true. All the greats believe in superstitions.

Slim had his back to the basket and Beans was on him tight like a thermal. One fake to the right with his bony elbows and then Slim lifted off with his wiry frame, turned in the air, shot over Beans.

“Kobe!” he shouted. The ball caught back rim, hit the hardwood, rolled. The game stopped. Beans just stared at him and Loafer at the top of the key put his foot on the ball to stop it from rolling to the other side of the court.

Joseph was the first brother to get punked for his jacket. But with respect to spiritual experiences, even the great interpreter of dreams couldn’t see legendary wide receiver Jerry Rice. So when Putty and his boys rolled up on me in my fresh-off-the-rack 49ers Starter Jacket, I braced myself for a fate worse than the pit.

The barbecue was just getting started, and Dad was already grilling. Cass had decided she was a vegetarian last week. She had been holding her baby brother when she realized that he was made out of meat.

“Can you help with my pinkie toes?” Betsy asked. She had forgotten her allergy medication, so her voice was thick and phlegmy, her eyes red like she’d been crying.

Ask Slater to drive you to the meet at Stone Steps. Your mom has the truck today. Big surprise, Slater never shows. Walk past the Dairy Queen and the LiquorMart as you hike west to the beach. Rafe’s already there when you arrive. His lips turn up in a smile that eats up his face. He’s got his skateboard with him. Do you wanna see a new trick? You do.