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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
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      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
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      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
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  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
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      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
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      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
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Cortney Lamar Charleston

Dear Basketball

              before Kobe Bryant


I must be a shorter man for never having played you well
enough. Height had to be the issue. I’m not sure if you recall,
but in Space Jam, Bill Murray said that Larry Bird wasn’t white,
he was clear. I’m not sure if anybody really buys that, but I see
his point—Bird was so damn good passing the ball he could
almost pass for black, if Indiana, the state, wasn’t suspect
in that way. I guess I’m trying to say that I’m not sure if
race matters in a place where nearly everybody looks
like me like with the NBA. Sure, there was Donald
Sterling, and still, a someone-like somewhere, but
that’s ownership, right? That’s not The Game, not
you who loves rims tightened to even odds; that
whole ownership dynamic just makes you one of us
in my eyes—we been there and done that and still that
in some ways, I hate to say it, to the law, but hopefully to
love, unconditional, like the way I feel for you, enough so
that I could write these few words that are still not poetry
enough to describe the electric shocks contorting Magic’s
face in such a way that it looks as if he’s happy when
he runs the fast break, or the move Michael makes
to break away from a defender, tongue out on the
takeoff in the lane, play-by-play on the radio as
we drive, my folks and me, past shirtless boys
playing on a public park court where somebody
might have died for something as meaningful as
looking in your direction with a twinkle in his eyes,
her eyes. Well, tell: when that happens, do you have
body enough to cry? Does your roundball head dribble,
have phantom pains when thinking of them like a foul
call that was a wrong call that cost your most favorite
team a crucial playoff game? But I guess that’d be a
choice then—since you are The Game, a small god
some of us pray to, fall prey to as we fall prey to
a world that don’t believe in you, statistical long
shot, quite the way we do and sometimes got to
just to survive all this and stave through: black
kids, block kids, short kids, tall kids, all kids that
are expected to fail as society designed for them to.


It Appears Somebody Has Lost Their Whole World


The wind stirs up a hiss with fallen leaves, dragging them
across the pavement like a knee, or an elbow, or a face.

Walk to the park, walk the playground and listen closely—
the swing set’s hinges sawing the silence in half, into a before
and an after, and yet there’s no laughter on the second side,
no sign of children at play, other than an echo, a sound-fossil
set upon a pendulum scheme that, too, will eventually pass.

Two questions need asking here. First: what happened
to all the little boys? Second: what did they do
to all the little girls and does anybody really care?

The tiny craters in the blacktop provide valuable clues,
argue, maybe, the boys finally became men, engorged
on an inner-fire like terminally ill stars, bloated, expanded
before exploding and cutting off electricity to the sky.

I can see it now: one fist becoming five unfurled fingers
constricting his throat like a boa or python, and from there,
the logical escalation, a move that took the whole world,
a galaxy into a hole not more than a few millimeters wide.


On Developing a Shooter’s Touch


​My right arm straight, hand hieroglyphed at the wrist
in proper form: I watch the ball twist a gaping wound
through the stale gym air, cutting a pathway to the rim.

It was a moment of consequence.

Not to the world in any grand sense. Not to my team,
which probably lost the game. Not to all the parents
fencing the baselines as if boards of maple wood like
those composing the courts we were playing on. No,
it was significant to me, taught me something about
myself, showed me what I didn’t know rested deep
within me--
 
                         my stomach suspended in the vacuum
of my own surprise as I fell gracefully from the apex
of my jump, leaving fresh breaths untaken like a pick
from my teammate near the top of the key I bypassed.

Before anyone could confirm hit or miss of the target,
my coach rushed the floor in the middle of the chaos,
embraced me in an outpouring of pride, bringing my
tiny body into his chest like a lead bit, but I was still
in shock from the whole episode, the hoop vibrating
on its rusty screws from the blow of the ball, a sound
I interpreted as a metallic crying, a form of grieving.

                              The first shot is always out of character.

That’s what folks say on the news in all those on-scene
TV interviews; that’s what I know to be true, from first-
hand experience, as well as the fact that if you’re any
good at it, you keep on shooting. Shooting. Shooting.

Shooting.




--
Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies, selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, his poems have appeared in POETRY, New England Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, River Styx and elsewhere.

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  • Home
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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
      • BEE LB Spring 2024
      • Grace Marie Liu​ Spring 2024
      • Sarah Mills Spring 2024
      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
      • Mike Puican Spring 2024
      • Sarah Sorensen Spring 2024
      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2024
      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Bryan Betancur Spring 2024
      • Karen George Spring 2024
      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
      • Jian Kim Fall 2024
      • Robb Kunz Fall 2024
      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
      • Stephanie Choi Fall 2024
      • Sarah Jack Fall 2024
      • Jen Karetnick Fall 2024
      • Ae Hee Lee Fall 2024
      • Svetlana Litvinchuk Fall 2024
      • Mary Lou Buschi Fall 2024
      • Angie Macri Fall 2024
      • Gary McDowell Fall 2024
      • Sam Moe Fall 2024
      • Camille Newsom Fall 2024
      • Elizabeth O'Connell- Thompson Fall 2024
      • Olatunde Osinaike Fall 2024
      • Jessica Pierce Fall 2024
      • Diane Raptosh Fall 2024
      • Isaac Richards Fall 2024
      • Robyn Schelenz Fall 2024
      • Christopher Shipman Fall 2024
      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
      • Wendy Wisner Fall 2024
      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
      • J​oe Baumann Fall 2024
      • ​Morganne Howell Fall 2024
      • Matt Paczkowski Fall 2024
      • Ryan Peed Fall 2024
      • Gabriella Pitts Fall 2024
      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
      • Paul Simmons Spring 2025
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
      • Na Yoon Amelia Cha-Ryu Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
      • ​Liam Strong ​ Spring 2025
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2025
      • ​Cassandra Whitaker Spring 2025
      • Angelique Zobitz Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
      • Meredith MacLeod Davidson Spring 2025
      • Jessica Mosher Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025