Hoop Dreams Are What You Wake Up From

We drink from a wide-mouthed bottle, sugar
and citrus painting our lips and our breath

clementine. Amani dribbles an orange basketball,
the tin ring of rubber and air echoing across

the blacktop—tar and gravel: feel the vibrations
running through the ground and into

him like sunlight. That night I will sleep
on his coarse woven couch with the blue glow

of Hoop Dreams splayed over us while
he cradles a basketball to his chest.

Sophomore year, Amani averages a double-double.
A crossover and a finger roll leave him

sprawled out on the hardwood, an asterisk
in Adidas, clutching an Anterior Cruciate Ligament

in halves. He’s carried off the court, the sweat
from his dark curls polishing shoulders. His face

thrusts upwards, bathed in the fluorescence
of the gymnasium light, the hardwood

a forest fire beneath our feet. We don’t
hear the squeak of sneaker soles—just

the hum of streetlamps and the corner stores
while he waits for that scar to firm. By then

we’re back beneath the naked rims that lean 
out, goose necking into the hot blacktop air. 

Kyle William McGinn is a union organizing, basketball coaching, Chihuahua owning poet whose poetry has appeared in Watershed Review, Stonecoast Review, and Typehouse, with forthcoming work in This Thing Called Poetry: An Anthology of Poems by Young Adults with Cancer from Finishing Line Press. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin - River Falls and holds an MFA from Hamline University. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.