By David Thoreen

For her, by then, the news was nonsense, names
she did not know, public policy proposals she
could not follow. Ugh, the weather girl, she’d say,
before she stopped talking altogether. What
are windows for? She still sat with a book in her lap
but rarely opened it. Why basketball, I wondered,
until I watched her watch a game. There was no plot,
no morally murky postwar setting, no confusing
characters, no Monsieur Poirot, no Miss Brodie,
no exposition, no dialogue filled with subtext
and subterfuge, no metaphors or motifs. No past
and no future, only this: ten men running full tilt
coast to coast, one catching a pass and spinning
at the top of the key, stuttering, feinting right,
then driving and in three quick steps rising and floating
to the rim, a flick of his fingers releasing the ball
that spins just so against the backboard and drops
through the hoop, riffling the net.

She couldn’t remember her husband or grown children,
but when the Golden Gophers scored and the screen filled
with close-ups of anonymous fans draped maroon
and gold, pumping fists, blowing kisses, waving their beer,
she knew it was her turn to cheer.

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David Thoreen’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Verse Daily, Flint Hills Review, The Greensboro Review, Kestrel, New Letters, Salamander Magazine, and elsewhere. He teaches writing and literature at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts.