Ode to the Basketball Sailing Over a Barbed-Wire Fence
BY TROY OSAKI
After Martín Espada
Praise Puyallup: city of daffodils named after the tribe—meaning generous.
Home to Washington’s largest state fair and 7,390 incarcerated Japanese.
Praise the Collins playfield director tossing a billion burnt orange planets
over the fence like a meteor shower. The smell of a gymnasium stiff in the air.
Praise the afternoon pick-up games in the parking lot where schoolchildren
once passed invisible ball after invisible ball to each other—the sun staring.
Praise every child whose dad is separated into a different camp somewhere
far off in Montana or Louisiana missing their behind-the-back dribble.
Praise the first teenager to launch a rubber rock high over a guard tower
and onto the moon, then fall asleep in a chicken shed with his brother.
Praise the courtside cheers they hear in their heads. Their mascot: a single
lightbulb dangling inside a barrack or a laundry line of damp clothes.
Praise the smooth globe flying to Manzanar, flying to Heart Mountain, flying
to a desert in New Mexico where scientists test the atomic bomb at twilight.
Praise the crystal ball-sized sphere crashing into Franklin D. Roosevelt’s face
as he burns a pile of banned books written in Japanese at the White House.
Praise the teeth falling from the president’s mouth. His gapped smile full
of wind from the Atlantic. 7,390 Japanese in Puyallup listen to him whistle.
Praise Camp Harmony: named unofficially for families waiting to be sent
to concentration camps. A stampede of basketballs falls from the sky.
