*
i watch dominique wilkins, a monarch butterfly
beautiful in the air, sweat bead-covered face,
coiling his arms into two smoke stacks
billowing puffs of sky, & am transported back in time
to the year before wham! broke up.
if my mother could go back, she would return
to when she was nothing but a speck
in such an insignificant universe, spelunking
through times square with her own mother,
who’d climbed to the top of the statue of liberty
long before god took that memory. the two of them,
lost in on of the hundred delis, their faces illuminated
by an electric new coke ad high above.
i want to believe my father would delorean himself
back to this year, so he could listen to “everybody
wants to rule the world” alongside all the other dudes
with thick hair swelling & thinning into mullets
& save his brother from pulling a trigger in their living room.
how dominique kisses the cross around his neck
before retreating to the other end of the basketball court,
with no regard for how his windmill dunk was two biceps
the shape of flux capacitors, machines strong enough to save us.
*
twenty years after the fact, a friend & i watched a rerun
of spud webb, five-foot-seven, hopes like lava ascending
from a volcano’s lips, jumping high like cracks mousing up walls,
dunking with such power all the lights in my family’s house
went out. in the darkness, my parents fought over dust
in the next room. wrapped in an echo of a standing ovation,
my dad cheered me on as i ric-flair-figure-four-leg-locked
my friend into submission against the hue of candlelight
painting our living room, while my mother’s quiet cries split
the foundation of her bedroom on the other side of the house,
her trembles lingering like the crack in my father’s voice as the tremor
in ever corner of our home started destroying us. what ruckus that gouged
everything i ever loved, a slam dunk distracting a heartbreak hiding in plain sight.
spud dunked like everything would always be fine, like it was all supposed to last.
*
in the year of robocop & lethal weapon, millions gathered
to watch an entire galaxy flex on god. forget his 37 points a game.
forget him chugging down coke & hustling larry bird for big macs.
michael jordan was a silent flame palming an orange ember.
for one night, the whole world started from the saliva dripping
off his extended tongue, creating a ruckus in space where the stars
couldn’t possibly still be stars. he was weightless on an earth with no air.
the onlookers became dust amazed by dust. everyone heard his body singing
so loud over their yelling that they stepped outside to see what was the matter
& found a saint soaring, glowing, on a thousand television sets. i’d like to think
watching michael jordan dunk in a hushed gymnasium is a lot like my birth:
my father seeing something so spectacular he couldn’t come up with the words
to describe the beauty, but he fell in love instantly.
*
vince carter was so much more than a mcdonald’s all-american,
more than stock car races on the beaches of daytona,
long before his mother dragged him to the atlantic & told
him to finesse the waves or drown. he was every kid dunking
on a plastic hoop in their bedrooms, every golden glow of light pollution lingering
on the horizon. the prince of the tomahawk dunk,
knowing how climb to heaven on a neon spark in a pair of red and-1 tai-chis.
can you imagine how one body can resurrect an entire dunk contest from the dead
with a honey-dip-elbow-hanging-off-the-rim slam & a liquid grin?
vince knew he could never die when he did a skin-splitting 360-degree spin
as superstars filmed him on silver camcorders after the computers didn’t murder us.
the world started & ended with this peak. nothing could ever be better.
he left a tremorous stamp on the earth. in my dreams, i picture the world
after there are no countries left, when radiation astronauts are exploring
palaces of ash—kingdoms where you can still hear tracy mcgrady watching vince
from the sideline & whispering wow under his breath,
after my family name became lost among the gravestones
covered in darkness—& they’ll discover a raptors jersey wind-beaten & faded,
whatever stars haven’t burnt out aligned into a picture of a savior
slitting the throats of his followers. vince’s post-y2k eruption,
like a cloak of fire etched on top of what used to be oakland arena,
has made me throw hands over whether or not he’s a god.
what immortality one must have to cause such a ruckus,
to never go away but, instead, mold yourself into still-recognizable fragments years later.
i, too, dream of what will be left of me after the world is destroyed.
perhaps a vhs tape of me splashing through rain puddles during an ohio flood.
the heap of plastic tossed into a canyon that was once lake erie, its carcass shattering
upon reaching the bottom. my three-year-old giggling voice calling out mommy, look at all the water beating off the canyon walls, the rain stopping, & my mother saying
it’s over as she walked us back into our crumbling house, holding her silver camcorder.
the echoes of our remains lapping against the burnt edges of dehydrated earth.
*
neglect turned everything to ash. i am made of a thousand things,
all of them inherited from a horizon of smoke before my mother taught me how to speak.
i live here, in ohio, where a plane flew overhead while my mother huddled her students
together, when nameless graves littered the streets of manhattan.
here, the wind has always passed through building-less skies.
the next spring, jason richardson, skyscraper suspended in the air
in a golden state warriors jersey, hanging like grief & dust, reversed a slam dunk
through his legs, backwards, &, in an instant, the hovering soot from a pool of debris vanished.
wounds we didn’t know we had healed into scars. colson, are the towers still standing
because we saw them? or because we grew tired of the image of destruction
& jason rewired beauty back into our hearts? i’m not entirely sure, but, that year,
my father got on a plane for the first time since four crashed into us.
*
the way zach lavine soared from a foot behind the free throw line filled my lungs
with air. the way aaron gordon’s slam over a mascot spinning around on a hoverboard
ripped it out of me. the hoop gods brought old-school & new-school techniques together,
forcing both to reconcile for the good of everyone watching. both men looked like soft,
weightless giants flying over a city. i think everyone became lovers that night,
pushing their foreign bodies against one another, caressing whatever goodness
they could find before it ran out. we didn’t know if we would ever have a night
like this again. it didn’t matter who the better dunker was,
because my mother moved back in & slow-danced with my father
against the glow of our television set, blocking the announcement of the final scores.
Matt Mitchell is a writer from Ohio. His work appears in, or is forthcoming to, venues like The Shallow Ends, NPR, Homology Lit, BARNHOUSE, Frontier Poetry, Empty Mirror, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others.