Winners wear
the hats, the shirts, the flare
that say so: CHAMPION
in cotton-poly neon.
And what about the other T’s?
No television sees
the second batch,
dispatched
to threadbare zones
like Sierra Leone
where loser-teams
reign supreme.
Scores
are redone. Pigskins soar
between the posts
of ghost
games. Ugandans celebrate
a fated
loss they’ve never known.
No one
sees until a documentary
spins its story
from an electricity-
free town. Victory
thinks the viewer, is upside down,
and a boy hails a false touchdown
and a bucket of water
from a filthy river,
and yes everyone, everyone’s a winner.
©
's nonfiction has been noted in The Best American Essays, and published by such journals as Prairie Schooner, Florida Review, and Colorado Review. Her poems have appeared most recently in Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and Cincinnati Review. She lives and teaches in Berkeley, California, where she's at work on a memoir about her two years teaching in a west Baltimore high school.
We’ve published two more poems by Kirn: “Hometown Tour after the Base Shuts Down” and “L'esprit de L'escalier.”
