back when we had nothing except our hands, which glowed beautifully and drew pictures of gods doing somersaults with the wind

And these bleachers speak every now and then

when someone’ll listen to their wood splinter,

jagged and gulling, when this old gym bent

our skin. I’m of the Rust Belt winters,

a ghost keeping in touch with pick and roll

calls glowing from the wombs of pimple-faced

jocks. I think about four-hundred cold

years from now, after this country’s traced

into a nuclear wasteland, travelers

in hazmat suits combing strip malls buried

beneath ancient places stuck calipers

away from space stations, cemeteries

shouldering lake-effect snow, in search of

young boys in nylon jerseys and lost love.

I was born in this gym, within the webs

of the basketball net, and in the wood,

in the scuffs of gloaming funeral beds

under heat lamps burning against boyhood,

which is most beautiful when you see it

holding up a body that is nothing

but a body swallowed by the sky, lit

like a tangerine pulsating, jumping,

gliding by the electric scores. This held

my body together after the earth

first learned to sharpen its teeth, when it swelled

into sand and then rock and then rebirth.

And this place will eat the apocalypse

when Ohio is dead and bodiless.

The dead have been singing nah nah nah nah

hey hey hey goodbye beneath the center

of town since years before legends clawed

through the night on buses led by splendor

and firetrucks, and the street lamps all blew

out and the only lights came from road flares.

Every generation, winners, known names:

Motz, Muckle, Tietz, Gilayni, sent prayers

into the air, bodies free, layups so

beautiful they could shake knots out of their

lineage. Hall leaped with seconds to go,

landed hard, galaxy fallen from air,

on his ankle. I fear the next collapse

will leave warped smiles in the hardwood gaps.

But there was no collapse the night Alex balled out and blocked that one kid’s layup. We can still hear the friction of skin to this day, on the night we drove home with the windows down in the middle of the first February thunderstorm in over twenty years. When I used up all of my Spotify skips just to get to the Springsteen song. Minutes after we cried because a bunch of kids we grew up with beat the shit out of the Bristol boys for the first time since we were too young to care about basketball or love. Minutes after coach took the entire team aside in the fourth quarter and said something that sounded like murder them boys tonight. It was the only time I ever hoped whatever flew into my throat would come back out dressed like a building rising from a city. That night we knew they’d retire Eric’s number because he dropped a couple dozen on Jones. We knew they’d have to carry him out in the arms of an entire town. The court was dangerous and jagged like migration haunting every juvenile step. We all laughed, even when the guys missed a shot, because we knew we were going to win. We stormed the floor in a parade of Nikes, exoskeletons of knee braces littering the hardwood. If a cacophony of cheers could ever be heard two towns over, it was then, when voices were so electric and traceable in the dark but not yet split by headlights. I swear to god I sang I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul at the top of my lungs and meant it, because every flash of lightning meant god was taking pictures of us so we wouldn’t be forgotten.