It didn’t matter that I married the game
or slept with a ball under my arm, Mom said
Girls don’t hoop, they wear hoops. And around here,
vecinas chirped: it’s always “¿Y tú novio?” season. But beauty
is a finger roll. A backdoor cut on the blacktop. A fadeaway
jump shot, two seconds left on the clock. So what mattered was Danny
talkin’ smack, even though his teeth were out of order. This isn’t the only history,
but is the history of everything: the neighborhood boys
who shot crooked, never learned my name, so I played them
Twenty-one, turned their ankles to jello,
made their backs kiss the floor, until they donned me
Lady Jordan, and who wouldn’t take that. Though I’ve never been
ladylike, I wore that rusted metal rim like a ring,
and slipped my bones through the net like a perfect white dress—
2020
Regular
Contemporary
Spoken Word
2025
Agency
Bilingual
Childhood & Coming of Age
Intersectionality & Culture
LGBTQ+ Experience
Music & Sports
Poetic Form
Womanhood
Allusion
an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference
Dialogue
conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie
Extended Metaphor
a metaphor that extends through several lines or even an entire poem
Hyperbole
exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally
Metaphor
a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic
Simile
a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”
Sonnet
A poem with fourteen lines that traditionally uses a fixed rhyme scheme and meter.