Icarus

When I was 9,
I remember playing soccer
With a plastic black and white ball.


In a dirt field we called playground 
Where nothing seem to grow except dreams
Where only love was spoken in coordinated footwork.


Which glued the world to our feet 


We directed the comet where to go 
To gracefully follow the phases of the moon, stars,
Stitching constellations of our dreams into the seams of the world glued to our feet. 


We jumped over broken glass left at parks 
Where people sang out their heart breaks into colored glass megaphones
With hopes that the world would hear them. 


We couldn’t imagine hopes being imprisoned in bottles
So we broke them to let them breathe
Used the shards to make outlines of the battlefield.


Because we battled our limits and nightmares.
Every game was an odyssey and each player
Their own Icarus, trying each time to surpass the inconceivable. 



We dribbled



Ran and felt at peace with the wind at our backs 
Displacing every fear we have had up to that point. 
Nothing mattered more than to drive the ball to the back of an invisible net.

To raise your hands towards the sun
Bellowing the most celestial of songs
As tribute to a child's game.


The world forgets for one second
The things that bring us pain
To feel this immensely wave of joy.


Nothing mattered at that moment.
Nothing mattered,
Nothing.


That is futbol to me.

RODRIGO SANCHEZ-CHAVARRIA is a writer and performer of Peruvian heritage heavily involved with Palabristas, a Minnesota based Latinx poets collective. He is a contributing author for A Good Time for Truth: Race in Minnesota and received an MFA from Hamline University and writes about fatherhood, the duality of two cultures in English, Spanglish and Spanish, and issues pertaining to his community.