By Ethan S. Berry

Brain zapped / Deadline nearing / Buzzer counting down / I’m on the other end of the court 
Now somewhere in the middle / Dribbling / Mouth is dry / I need water / I want coffee / In the stands my high school crush sits next to her boyfriend, watching me / As that candy colored clown they call the sandman tiptoes through the stands / Whispering softly to the spectators, Hotdogs! Get your hotdogs! Hotdogs! Dollar hotdogs! / But no one’s buying / I pity the clown so much that I take my eyes off the ball / Empathy kills me again / The ghost of Kobe Bryant steals the ball from me / Runs it in for a slam dunk / Buzzer buzzes / And we’re all celebrating that great final play in Shanghai / Kobe tells me I did good / I tell him he did better / And President Xi Xingping gives Kobe the biggest trophy ever made / Then he gives my team, the losing team, participation trophies / And we leave the game feeling as if we are the most entitled people of all time / We start a few wars in the Middle East just to prove that their oil is rightfully ours / And the war is so time consuming that we hardly have time to play basketball anymore / And we don’t / We only rest when the Candy Colored Clown creeps through our window to sprinkle stardust in our eyes / And when we sleep we dream of Kobe’s magnificent dunk / We forget about it when we wake, go back to playing war / Bomb a hundred school kids just to get to the Bad Guy in the middle / And we do this year after year, missing Kobe win game after game, missing him transition to film, missing his Oscar win / And we don’t pause until Kobe dies / We weep for a week, thinking of that game we played together / Then forget / Forcefully forget the good things people can do / And we go back to playing war.