Lady Patriots

Juices swell in pears again.
Fruits fallen all around us

outlining our shapes.
Athletic, young.

Where the armory stood
behind the school,
a field that couldn’t be shared

beheld from its edges. 
Hard and green.
Then soft. Then shadowed.

Coach made us lie on our backs
to see this in our minds:
ace after ace, closed in our faces.

Distance means I can almost miss
how we retched in the bin for trash
outside the door,
how I hurtled myself

between the floor
and what another girl slapped
as hard as she could,
the whip of her hand

and the white ball 
even in my dreams
curving over the net,
little quilted moon

occasionally striped 
with red and blue,
the idea of a nation
shot down from the sky.

When we ran our sprints
the red clock blared down
girl by girl by sweating
girl, ferric the scent
of our coincidental wombs’

synced sheddings—coarse
our voices shouting 
lines Out or In.
Coach harped on the undersung
role of the mind:

Imagine you are connected
by an invisible thread
crucial to keep taut—
as we screamed what was ours,
whose gap, whose cross shot.

In the footage we saw
from above how we moved
like a single, six-pronged beast
and it was good, good. Six 
fangs in the mouth of one angel.

My position meant
The Free One. My job, to live
as low to the ground
as a person can live
and still be said to stand.

It was important, Coach said,
to visualize what we wanted,
let us pray. We closed our eyes
and saw Regionals. State. A spot
in heaven. The occasional smut scene  
starring Abeline, Sianna, Mary Beth.

Every gameless afternoon
I would lie next to X in her bed,
our faces close on the same pillow,
wanting to wake with her
hair in my mouth. To wrap my wrists
with the invisible lines

connecting our hips
until we drooled. I prayed
on a loop like a spell
darkening the room, turning 
the moon into morning light, 
morning’s light 

back to the moon.
Twice through eyelids
pretending to be closed
I watched her stand at the mirror
naked for me, turning 
side to side, unravish’d bride,

mythical bird that burns
on a cycle every day
resolveless. Green pears
in rot enwreathed
in mold the weight of tanks.
I got so low

the seeds got a taste of my knees.
We ran our drills, falling at a spin,
practicing
a looking that was also
touching—looking
that was a kind of life.