In honor of National Poetry month, poets Janae Johnson and Jessica Jacobs write tributes celebrating the women's basketball teams of 2019 national champ Baylor and runner-up Notre Dame.
Twelve Strings, by Janae Johnson
If It All Comes Down to This, by Jessica Jacobs
Twelve Strings
Janae Johnson
A Tribute to the 2019 NCAA Women's Basketball Champions: Baylor University Bears
One:
By the time you've reached the NCAA tournament
Accolades are like oxygen
Memories of past selves
Flood each news feed
& it's quite easy to forget
The daylong AAU tournaments
Lemon-Lime Gatorade lunches
Portable hoops tipping from a healthy gust of wind
Geometry classes just lookin like a flex offense
Sneakers torn to the last color of socks
A sea of 'boy players'
Parting
To the tune of an assiduous spin move
'Cause they never saw it coming
Back when every non-sports dream
Competed with an almost confettied arena
Colored with fans who love to shout at referees
Just to hear their own voices
Echo themselves alive
To witness this Big Dance
& shimmy
You betta believe everyone
Who's made it this far
Can play
But few folks
Can say
They've cut the net
Two:
Anyone versus Kalani Brown AND Lauren Cox
Will be a mismatch
& though they are too mannered to laugh
At you
To your face
I imagine their arms chuckle a bit
At the audacity of any player
To enter the paint
Without compromising the shoulders position
Without contorting the wrist
Without wincing the right eye just a tad bit
A once picturesque follow through release
Now, yanked back into submission
Each opponents rebound
Snatched, held & kissed
Consider it a gift
Three:
Don't look at the legacy too closely
It will distract you from this team
This roster of both brand new & polished
Crosscourt chest-passes, untouched
Sprawly offensive rebounds
Challenging every shot with reckless abandon
On this team
When one bruises
The others
Are ice-in-hand
Ready
To heal
Four:
Yo Chloe Jackson is fast
Like, running water
Like, a twitter feed
Like, Questlove on snare drums
Like, how didn't her hair even move?
Like, remember when Superman flew to another city?
& still had that lil dangling front curl?
Like, how did she win the race to the end of the court, while dribbling?
Like how did she learn a new position?
As a point guard?
On a national championship team?
In just one year?
That's... fast
Five:
Every time the camera cut to Kalani Brown's mother, Dee
We, the children of Pre-WNBA
Were reminded of continuum
A rarity of Black Mother
& Black Daughter
Period
Let alone
Split-Screened on national television
& tied by southern hoops
& coached by the same woman
& each
Earned a name of their own
Six:
While the men were complaining that there weren't any dunks
they missed how quickly
Didi Richards can cut to the rim
to change the entire complexion
Of a zone defense
Seven:
Baylor never forgot
How worthy Notre Dame was
How bulletproof Ogunbowale entered every quarter
How reckless & hungry
they stayed
Fought
Taught
That sometimes
When you got necessary shooters
& necessary heart
You don't need height
When most of your team knows what a national championship tastes like
You can almost bet your body
There's no going back
Eight:
When the 3rd Quarter of the national championship game
Came to a close
Lauren Cox fell to the ground
Clutched her left knee
From the television screen
You could hear the collective
Sucker punch of wind
knocked
From Amalie Arena
To Waco, Texas
Sure, we've seen these injuries before
& have heard what Cox continues to overcome
Her body rolled enough
On the slick floor
For even the non-hoop fans
To know
how significant
Her presence continues to be
Nine:
After the injury, Coach Kim Mulkey say:
I could cry right now
but i gotta go to work
Ten:
In the fourth quarter
Each point was grit-mouthed
Earned ungraciously
The quick release of a jump shot
held a degree of difficulty
Often undermined
By a machismo eye
I whisper to myself
We needed this game.
This is good.
For Women's Basketball
...Regardless of what happens
Eleven:
Coach Kim Mulkey say:
When you lose a big time player
in the middle of a national championship game
You're not supposed to win...
Twelve:
A split second after the final buzzer
White jerseys flood center court
Confetti raining from ceiling
Brown, 50-yard dashes into Cox's arms
& everyone breathes
Again
Each player & coach
take turns
Spinning at the twelve net strings
Head above rim level
like they're looking from heaven
Imagining
What the ball has been watching
this entire time.
Janae Johnson is a black queer poet, community organizer, teaching artist, and full-time educator. Hailing from California, she is the 2015 Women of the World Poetry Champion as well as a 2015 National Poetry Slam Champion. Janae's poetry has appeared in outlets such as ESPN, PBS Newshour, Blavity, and Kinfolks: A Journal of Black Expression. Janae holds a M.Ed. in Educational Leadership and facilitates writing and performance workshops for all ages.
If It All Comes Down to This
Jessica Jacobs
NCAA Women's Championship: Baylor vs. Notre Dame: 82-81
1.
The final shots open every
article: Bounding Baylor from dead-
heat to the lead, Chloe Jackson's drive
down the lane for a layup
off the glass; Arike Ogunbowale's first
free throw missed -- how she doubled over
in disbelief. The buzzer's scream. Confetti falling
for the other team. We so badly want to believe
history pivots on these actions and the few
who make them, that these final moments are all
that matters -- as though everything
were won or lost by famous names
in this clock twitch, this
finger snap of time.
2.
But history is so much
deeper: What about Jackson's jumper,
the first points on the board; or Ogunbowale's
tying shot? Or earlier? Once, each was a girl
following an older brother -- to soccer,
then to the court. Did it begin with crackerjack
kids on travel teams, or boys on broken asphalt
and bent-to-hell rims, boys who tagged
their sisters in? Or was it earlier still? That winter
in Massachusetts, in 1891: Boys shivered
on the football field, so a man
nailed two peach crates to a gym balcony
and handed the boys a ball. After
every point, a janitor scaled a ladder
to remove it -- until they sawed
the bottoms out, and Basket Ball
was born. Down the road, a women's gym
up a set of stairs so shallow a co-ed
could climb without tipping
her uterus (this, how doctors believed
hysteria was born -- team sports
and normal stairs, too taxing
for a lady's lady-parts). Inside,
a woman once so weak she fainted
while playing piano, now a teacher
who put up baskets of her own
and welcomed women to the game.
3.
What if we drop the fiction
of beginning and end, the fantasy
of the tourney-winning shot? What if instead
we bring ourselves to each moment
as though each were a moment
of glory? If we place this championship game
beside the daily others, let our backyard, backlot
clunker shots ring in harmony with every net-kissed,
finger-flicked other? What if we make this girl, the one
snugging up her too-big shorts, the one fitting her toe
to the line in her driveway, in the park, in the city
rec center, this girl charting the arc of the ball
in her mind before willing her body
to trace it, what if we make her
MVP of this moment? -- this moment,
the one that matters most, just like
the ones before it and the ones
that will follow.
Jessica Jacobs is the author of the poetry collections Take Me with You, Wherever You're Going and Pelvis with Distance, winner of the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.