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My Football Team is Winning (III)

Dorsey Craft

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And my granddaddy’s still dead. He swats
an almighty yellow jacket from a star-soaked
can of Coke while our tailgate moves farther
out on the asphalt grid. We’ve got a healthy
lead. We’ve got a blond quarterback with eyes
like the last two red salmon pouting pink face
to face in a river that forgot rock,
forgot North. When I couldn’t read the score


they gave me glasses, and the grit smoothed in
to smother. When the blond drops back to pass
his footwork blesses deviled eggs, cold ham.
If he slings an interception, settle
in, belt out a rag. If my granddaddy’s
an angel, blow the whistle, throw the flag.

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My Football Team is Winning (IV)

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I tell the robot play ocean sounds and drift
into a dream where our quarterback
licks my feet, lavishes my cracked instep,
whispers his signal calls between my toes,
spills our saliva playbook down my heel
in a tonguing I understand foretells
another championship, thick rings, fat tears.
I am no Nebuchadnezzar, begging
Daniel to speak symbol into iron
and clay—kingdom after kingdom statued
in the mauve unconscious of a tyrant.
Metaphor is a mascot, tongue-less
in the dark of a dank summer locker.
When I wake, it’s Saturday, autumn crisp.

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My Football Team is Winning (V)

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Coach climbs to the top of the stadium,
stretches out his arms to feel the
presence
of the Living God, wreaths of rain-soaked
wisteria. In the grocery store, Coach
places my hand at the end of the ball,
tucks the other end between my elbow
and my right breast. Coach sprints forty yards
to call a timeout. Coach knows his passion
will be rewarded. He has special
affinity for receivers of his
own height, weight, and skin color. Coach is filled
with the spirit of dance, spilling like salt
and honey into his open skull, rising like
a hot gold hymn, like a terrible prayer.

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My Football Team is Winning (VI)

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A song, he says, the best, is yet to come:
a rag for the WR whose fingers
spider twenty inches, sing a camera flash
cradling a grey kitten, a white mouse,
the best hands in the NFL, direct
delivery from the Carolina
upstate. I bellow the low note, the third
down sound that drowns my mind, the snap count,
the falconer screaming for his beast
over eighty-thousand in a sun-scooped bowl.
The kicker took off a wing when he whiffed
wide-right, and we sucked our teeth, soaked handprints
in the smalls of our mothers’ backs, the size
of silver dollars stacked on a flat wrist.

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Dorsey Craft’s debut collection, Plunder, won the 2019 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Massachusetts Review, Poetry Daily, Salt Hill, Shenandoah, Southern Indiana Review and elsewhere. She lives in Lake City, Florida and serves as Poetry Editor for Southeast Review.

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