Eric Wang
DAE remember dating the boy with his own basketball hoop?
and there are longer, sweatier walks back home nowadays and sometimes, in the summer when you can still spot the glimmer of light when it’s late, i’ve imagined poking a bendy straw into the descending sun and sucking its Capri Sun blood, tropical blast the flavor of those days when we scoured youtube for clips of our favourite dunks: for me, 2007 playoffs, baron davis assuming the mantle of thunder god and bequeathing unto andrei kirilenko his most harrowing gift of lightning. for you, 2000 summer olympics, le dunk de la mort, vince carter a dragon scaling the waterfall, a gundam traversing six star systems and however many parsecs, the most poetic manifestation of a hypotenuse diagram we’d ever seen. course, we didn’t know the first thing about basketball, never watched a game, but then again, the fairy tales, the precarious algebras of flight, were always best when you didn’t know
and besides, our calves looked so great too, from all those exercises trying to at least touch the rim of your hoop, though our shorts looked kinda like the ones adam sandler wore in that one pic. you know the one. we should’ve known better. that much, i’m sure, will always be true. anyway, when it turned out that no amount of calf raises would make sky gods of us despite our olympian legs, we lowered your hoop as far as it could go, and i stood beneath it because you wanted to try dunking on me. and you did, you marvellous no-vertical having boy, you did. and again. and again. your body against mine. and wow you were sweaty, and gosh you stunk like the breath of summer. but my, those calves, that wreath of perspiration to go with those awful shorts. you and your very own dunk de la mort; you were the first of the dangerous things i knew, o glistening truth:
how we come to learn beauty on its wings.
and besides, our calves looked so great too, from all those exercises trying to at least touch the rim of your hoop, though our shorts looked kinda like the ones adam sandler wore in that one pic. you know the one. we should’ve known better. that much, i’m sure, will always be true. anyway, when it turned out that no amount of calf raises would make sky gods of us despite our olympian legs, we lowered your hoop as far as it could go, and i stood beneath it because you wanted to try dunking on me. and you did, you marvellous no-vertical having boy, you did. and again. and again. your body against mine. and wow you were sweaty, and gosh you stunk like the breath of summer. but my, those calves, that wreath of perspiration to go with those awful shorts. you and your very own dunk de la mort; you were the first of the dangerous things i knew, o glistening truth:
how we come to learn beauty on its wings.
Biography
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Eric Wang is a queer Chinese writer residing in Scarborough, Canada. His work can be found in The Puritan, Fugue, and is forthcoming elsewhere!
Twitter @: @poemaroo |
