Issue 1.1
Summer 2021
Lisa Marie Brimmer
Reflection:
There is no skip protection for memory! I was so healed by basketball culture in the late nineties. The adoptee/card-collector/artist I was couldn't play the game. In the day of this poem I would borrow R & B albums from the library. My aunt affirmed this interest when she gifted me a signed copy of the My Name is Joe CD. In '98 my favorite album was actually Boyz II Men Evolution—another gift from a kindred.
Cultural kinships were portals to me then (and now). Blessings to the albums, bowling alleys, and books that tethered me to this earthly realm. Blessings to ancestor and native keepers of the lands of my old home. Thank you spirit for protecting me! Now I look back and see with older eyes. The needle of time wiggles a bit as I come to the conversation of Black pleasure, belonging and diaspora. I see queer survival. I see steel ribs holding in more than just some old glass panes, but supporting the school as yet another lung of the nation-state.
b team
tip off / no ankle tape needed / an opus of layups / grins dripping
of all stars / a family outing / quick drill caught on tape
on trophy watch / the scout the break / floating hanes tees
rolled sleeves / near neenah in ninety-eight/ each body a scuffle
of sweat / a signature / grape gatorade stained teeth / salty leather
bounce pass to bounce past / behind the back / wrinkled cotton / cheap
gods / jog backwards / bob / mesh covered cross / metal slapping glass
ribbons / masking / beaded braids thrum necks / a bulging jersey scrim
a game hiding in ritual / material / hunt down the video / blockbuster
origin / the bubbler / how quickly it all turns / we can kill you
from we can have this / you can’t / mine / we can member you / apart
benched browsing / scavenged / east bay catalogues / finally subbed
after a late scoring game / fake passes opined on the pine / veins opened
across the grain / but the bullets don’t carry / they make better guards
i could only defend / not feed the mill / my squeezy bottle / and hardly
a fingernail engraving / to prove i’m here / for jokes and a whopper junior
vigilant / blues varsity / sweat shared in headphones / joe’s i wanna know
quality skip protection / back row dodge floorshow love / a soft sunset
pink / rewound winter / our bodies technical fouls / enclosed dungeons
out of bounds / each child a free throw / shaking a fragile net / let it out
here / let it out / around the world is one big jump stop / a tear in the clinic
in the field / sutures / make your thatched metal bands / secure glass
every rib / a partition a time out / what old high school isn’t a prison
clock ticking / good game good game / did you see that exposed rib
Lisa Marie Brimmer is a writer and educator whose work has been published in The Public Art Review, Gasher Journal, and is forthcoming from The B'K'. Brimmer lives on Dakota land in so-called Minneapolis, MN and is a recently committed MFA candidate at Randolph College. Online @leesuhmaroon & lisamariebrimmer.com
Lisa's Recommendations
Boyz II Men—Evolution, 1997
Joe—My Name Is Joe, 2000
The Last Dance —Netflix, 2020