Poem In Which The Houston Comets Are A Metaphor For Grief
One day, everything will stop existing—
sun turned red giant,
planet engulfed. Even before that,
we’ll all be gone, the inevitability
of death. All the little things
lost along the way—Flash games,
out-of-print novels, the Houston Comets.
In a sense, all of us will be bought
by a local furniture mogul
& dismantled bit by bit, an agonizing
final two years. The very end,
it was so fitting—after Ike
swept across the city, the team played
its final home game three hours away
& then was gone, forever,
just a memory, the outline
of existence. That’s how this all goes—
we cease to exist in ways
that only vaguely resemble how
we spent our best years.
Blocked By The Moon
We won’t see totality here in Iowa,
which doesn’t come
as a surprise. Flyover country
flown over even by the interstellar.
The orange glow of the sun
isn’t too much different
from that of a basketball, except
the ball doesn’t shine the same way,
quieter in how it makes its star.
Imagine LeBron sprinting
the length of the floor,
jumping as Iguodala’s shot
goes up, but instead of a hand
contacting it, sending it away,
it’s something else,
the lunar object eclipsing everything,
Mike Breen left only to shout:
blocked by the moon.
Justin Carter
Justin Carter is the author of Brazos (Belle Point Press, 2024). His poems have appeared in Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, Sonora Review, and other spaces. Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, Justin currently lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer and editor.
Why this Knocked Taylor out:
Sometimes I get nervous about wanting to publish more basketball poems because it feels self indulgent but dammit these are good and bring me joy and why else start a lit mag if not to publish poems that make me giddy.
For "Poem in Which..." I'm drawn to the nostalgia. Both how grief makes us nostalgic and how it blinds us to how "we spent our best years" may not have been that great but also may have? There's a complication in the narrative of the Houston Comets that maybe only a few people will get but I got it and I loved it. (RIP the comets man).
For "Blocked By The Moon" I mean come on. The way we idolize our heroes in the same way we idolize literal celestial bodies goes crazy!!!!
I also think for both of these there's a little bit of an inside joke happening for basketball players that I fully realize not everyone will buy into but idc. Go Jazz! (lol sorry). So I’m hesitant to explain further because this is such a niche topic and I kinda just want to leave it that way.
Interview:
You wrote a whole manuscript of sports poems. Talk to me about this project. Why sports? How did your poetry evolve over writing the manuscript?
I could type a lot of cliches here about sports and how they're a microcosm of human emotion and blah blah blah, all stuff that's true, but frankly I wrote a book of sports poems (which is still looking for a home if any editors are reading this!) because I like watching sports and thinking about sports. I left academia a few years ago for a full-time editing position in the sports industry and also do a lot of freelance women's basketball writing, and sports have always featured in some of my poems, but once I was even more enmeshed in that world, I got the itch to start exploring my relationship with that world in my non-journalist/analyst writing.
This was kind of a project that I was mostly doing on the back burner until my wife and I had our first (and only—please stop asking, family members!!!) child last December. He was born during the Pop-Tarts Bowl, which was such a weird fact, and about a week after he was born I was sitting in the chair and he was asleep on me and I took my phone out and wrote a poem about the Pop-Tarts Bowl, and I think something just clicked. I needed to keep exploring how I see the world through this prism of sports fandom.
The basketball-to-poetry pipeline goes crazy, how do you see your poetry in conversation with other athletes turned artists?
A-ha! I've fooled the reader into thinking I'm an athlete!
On a serious note, I think there's something inherently poetic about basketball that reflects our current moment. I'm thinking of what Tony Hoagland called the "skittery poem of our moment." Baseball was poetry for the old world—the slow, methodical nature of it. Basketball is the poetry of now, these quick bursts, 24 seconds until you go back the other way.
I read Hanif Abdurraqib's new essay collection earlier this year, which all revolves around basketball, and it was this beautiful reflection of how sports can be this backbone that runs through your life.
I don't know if my work is directly in conversation with that book or in other works of sports literature. I think it might be more in conversation with a different kind of sports writing, like Deadspin before it got ruined or SB Nation team blogs. I think that world influences me just as much as poetry does now, though that world also barely exists as the SEO-ification of online sports writing has killed a lot of the creativity that inspired me.
How do you see these two poems in conversation with each other?
Space!
But beyond the space imagery, I think both poems are about something that's missing. I have another poem in this manuscript where I think I kind of illuminate the whole idea of what I've been writing over the last couple of years: "Lately, I’ve been thinking about loss—/not death, just loss."
These poems are part of this conversation. Maybe it's that I started writing the work in manuscript after I moved away from Texas—in 2022, my wife and I moved to Iowa to be closer to her family, and it was a good decision, as it got us out of a college town where we'd been since 2014. But moving away from there, it felt like entering a whole different world. Time doesn't exist in college towns. I got older and older there, but I never felt older. Now that I live in the suburbs and have a kid, I can feel the wear and tear of age, I can feel the world moving, and it's a good feeling, but it's also a new era of life.
I don't know. I'm rambling now. "Blocked By The Moon" is really more about absence than loss, though the two things are the same, in many ways.
Bonus: if you could pick one NBA and one WNBA player to read your poetry, who would you choose and why?
NBA: I feel like James Harden might vibe with some of this work. There's a lot of Houston throughout my work and while Harden's not playing in H-Town these days, it just feels right.
WNBA: Imani McGee-Stafford isn't currently in the W, but she's published her poetry before, so I think from that angle, she'd be a fun person to talk shop with. If I had to go with active players, I mean...I've got to go with Chennedy Carter. I've always admired her tenacity, ever since her days at Texas A&M, and since we're both from Texas, I think there's something in the work that she might "get" in a way that people not from Texas won't.