Prayer Time at the YMCA

Sneakers squeak on the wooden floor 
as ten men, and boys becoming men,
huff and shout and surge toward one hoop
and then the other. On the flip side of the divider, 
children create a cacophony of of ricocheting balls,
orange orbs bouncing off walls, backboards, rims. 
Sometimes they sink one, and grin, but I can’t hear 
their celebration over the din. The noise is a substance
I move through while looping the overhead track, as a wind.  

Suddenly, it all stops. The absence is startling. I look down 
on two rows of people kneeling in a corner, males in front, 
hijab-draped forms behind, see the sun setting through 
slits of reinforced windows: it’s time for evening prayers. 
The huge gym is now almost silent. Each bounce of the ball used 
by a Hispanic family echoes loudly, and the two kids tossing 
a football in another corner sound like they’re being loud in a library.
The devout drop down and make wherever they are holy, heedless
of the unmoved unbelievers, or the footfalls of the faithless above.

ARIA DOMINGUEZ is a writer whose poetry and creative nonfiction navigate the terrain between beauty and pain. Her work has been published in anthologies and she was the winner of the 2021 Porch Prize in Creative Nonfiction, finalist for the 2021 Lighthouse Writers Workshop Emerging Writers Fellowship in Nonfiction, and winner of a Fall 2021 Brooklyn Poets Fellowship. She works with a nonprofit focused on food justice and lives in Minneapolis with her son.