I saw my best friends play basketball the other day - Revised

Dear friends 🍂 🍁 🪶

I hope you’re as safe & well as you can be. :)

I wrote this poem last February, 2025, on a plane home from Valencia, Spain. I’d flown there to see two of my best friends (& former teammates!) at their pro basketball game.

They’ve seen the first draft, which I don’t think I’ve shared here. Revising has been tricky: A reckoning, on my part, with all the ways implicit racism & white guilt take shape, as I continue learning how to love my friends well. As always, I’m not sure this poem is where it needs to be. But I’m working my way there—in the poem & in life.

Thank you so much for reading, as always. Please take care of yourselves (as well as you’re able). ❤️‍🩹

With care & gratitude,

Mik

for N.F. & M.D.
In the pros, still, post-ups seem invisible, open
 
& bright like indigo despite the cold, dusk-soaked gym.
 
I am guilty, like every guard, of not even looking 
in the paint, though they’re two rather obvious- 
coloured fields on the court. When
the ball was in my hands, once,
I assumed safe passage to the
basket: Ball screens I used
but didn’t wait for. 
And I think, 
now, of everyone  
I love & believe, in 
every version of guard I’ve been. 
And I see little more important than
passing the ball. Black women have been open,
day & night, every season, for a very, very long time. 

• A new dispatch, from St. John’s, Newfoundland.

• The next installment of my fairytales-in-verse series: “The Little Mermaid” - Part 7.

• For the one-and-only, wonderful Conscious Writers Collective, I write previews for our upcoming guest speakers! Take a peek here.

• Full archive here 🫆❤️‍🔥