prayer when knees give
Rent from DeepDyve- prayer when knees give
for Derrick Rose
if i should ever have made itto fame as a basketball playerjumping reckless toward an orange skythen i would have hoped to explodeon to the scene like a shell casing,or like a newly minted hit record,or like an acl bucklingunder the pressure of everyone.
if the good Lord had made methe one to put the city onmy back like intersectingbeams of oak i would have runlike it was for every lifeincluding my own small, selfish one.
if they ever named me Rose, or thingthat grows from the dying forest, or boywho shouldn’t be, or statistical outlierthen i would praise the brevity of a star’slife in the scheme, knowing that it existseven if nobody names it and only encountersit as a black hole. [End Page 51]
Nate Marshall is coeditor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books). His first book, Wild Hundreds, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. His rap group Daily Lyrical Product recently released an album, Grown. He is a visiting assistant professor at Wabash College.
