By Noreen Ocampo1
| Old violinists and cellists never forget how to warm up: flex the fingers into sea stars, make constellations of the wrists, arms. | One by one, pale shirts come off at the court’s edge, settle like fallen magnolia petals. Beneath the cloth: moonbright skin, soft as a peach’s ripe bruise. | The neighbors’ children have grown and gone. With legs long as the distance to Georgia’s elusive end, they chase the blue mountains. | |
| The forgotten net requires unexpected engineering. Motion spinning into its rusted gears, it remembers how to breathe. | The simple pleasure of instruction: white painted lines underfoot, a box in which to stand. | ||
| Yesterday’s conversation over orange beers and coconut margaritas: if the sun is a basketball, then what of the moon? | The body forgets stiff limitations, remembers childhoods spent grazing asphalt, stumbling home with cratered knees. | The certain sound of the racket’s strings finding their mark: a reminder for the hand to tighten and the chest to follow through. | The youngest should serve first, unafraid to toss high and slice the racket with enough heart to birth a new comet. |
| Let there be no such thing as too much power. Let the yellow ball make its rainbow arc in the purpling evening sky. | |||