Love Poem for the Beam

I love the purple of a roller rink

from the future

I love the fantasy of having suckled

on a different time zone and who I would be

if I’d grown up American (probably dead)

and I love seeing the long-suffering

invisibly drawn into the center

of a golden hour for tipoff

and I love the West Sacramento goats

released to clear the underbrush every spring,

something adorable about the ultimate

and fatal impossibility of defense

and I love losing or at least 

to love still being here I guess 

I have to love having lost and I did it too

for decades, hanging my invisible banners 

and mismanaging the catastrophe of my personality

I love that it rained all winter

in Northern California and flooded

Kevin Huerter’s pool during a road trip

so the clouds shimmered 

around the beam like curtains

and I love the conceit that the lasers 

on the roof of the arena

are operated by a giant plastic button

that suddenly appears postgame

next to the scorer’s table because 

why not turn the increasingly diffuse,

psychedelic or fictional relationship

between cause and effect 

into prop comedy

I love decibels 

as a measure of faith 

or denial, impermanence 

hammered into a weapon

and I love the idea that I could love 

something that could really hurt me, 

scrape out the whole franchise of my self-belief 

with a spoon or ceremonial shovel, 

but in the purple light I have no shadow

so I know I am just practicing, 

even with a shot clock in my pulse. Still, 

that glow let me imagine sending

my momentum into something

that would leave me to become perfect,

made me wonder if it wasn’t time

to risk damage for string music—a willingness

that was kissed awake by a fast break so quick

the court never felt the rubber

and sat up wearing a crown

MEGHAN HARRISON is a writer and performer based in Toronto. Her poetry has recently appeared in Contemporary Verse 2 and The Ex-Puritan.