We played bigger and bigger until we began winning. And we won by doing what all Indians before us had done against their bigger, whiter opponents—we became coyotes and rivers, and we ran faster than their fancy kicks could, up and down the court, game after game. We became the weather—we blew by them, we rained buckets, we lit up the gym with our moves.

We learned something more important than fist, at least at that age. We learned to make guns of our hands, and we pulled the trigger on jumpers all damn day. And when they talked about the way we played, they called it, Run’n’gun, and it made them tired before they ever stepped on the court. Just thinking about a pickup game against us made the white boys from the junior high and high school teams go to sleep. While they slept, we played our dreams.

My country needs me, and if I were not here,

I would have to be invented.

HORTENSE SPILLERS

Asterion’s Lament

You curving—you rivering and full—

how did Theseus find no joy in you?

Let me be your tender captain, ferry

the ultramarine thread you unraveled

from your skein—to lead the most lost through

the labyrinth of your body.

Go forward, always down, you said.

I know another name for holy is water—

I have suffered the hot hurt of thirst.

Only the mouthless would not anoint themselves

with your mouth, descend the violet-green

zigzagging the shoal of your collarbone,

hull their chests and fall upon your shore.

I am alive, and coursing to drink

on the current of jet flowing sternum to nipple—

barefooted, slipped from my shirt, dizzy

for the silvered-green ribbons swimming

your wrists. How each flickered stream spills

into the agate cups of your palms. I will sink

the deep channel bending the sandhills

of your hips, down the jetties of your thighs.

In your hands I am a coming vessel,

an empty boat, willing to be helmsman or helmed,

moored, made fast—shackled and filled.

More pilgrimage than wandering. More mercy

than amaze. I will follow this wet map of you

along whatever remains of the corridors of my life.

And if you can close your eyes to the Minotaur

in me, with her heavy twist of horns, I can find you.

Go forward, always down, we will,

to the beauty and slake of a monster’s appetite.

Like Church

My lover comes to me like darkfall—long,

and through my open window. Mullion, transom.

A good window lets the outside participate.

I keep time on the hematite clocks of her shoulders.

And I’ve done so much of it—time. Her right hip

bone is a searchlight, sweeping me, finds me.

I’ve only ever escaped through her body. What if

we stopped saying whiteness so it meant anything.

For example, if you mean milk of magnesia say

milk of magnesia, or snow, or they’ve hurt another

one of us, or the quarter moon is smoke

atop the dirty water, or the pearline damp she laces