Be Holding

Who would think that such beauty could come from a YouTube clip of an NBA game from the 1980s? That one freeze-frame of a dunk shot could generate a meditation on breath, family, trees, history, oceans, gratitude, hope? Ross, a “docent in the museum of black pain,” seamlessly brings together a whole slew of emotion and breathlessness, that feeling of falling when “witnessing/the unwitnessable, the way/ we do so often these days” — but the poem never gives up, and the falling is reimagined as flight, and we are encouraged to breathe even if we are breathless. Dang. Great read.