Missing Touch with Box Out

I want to be touched like a basketball player lined up
on the key, waiting for the free throw shooter to shoot.
Arms fighting over arms for a slight advantage;
both sides preparing for the same thing
while hoping for something different; knees bent,
eyes on the shooter’s fingertips; asses bobbing to the beat
of his pre-shot dribbles. I watch him, the way one might
the last egg in the house sizzling in butter. The shooter
squares up his thin shoulders, looks into the empty box
painted onto the backboard. He’s imagining the ball
floating right over the lip of the rim. Yeah, that’s how
I want to be touched—two teams breathing on each other
in a semicircle, elbowing for position, necks slicked in sweat.
Ready for that body contact we call crashing the boards.

Alejandro Lucero is the author of At the Bottom of the Sea with One Light, winner of the 25th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize (BOA Editions, 2027), and the chapbook, Sapello Son, which was named the Editors’ Selection for the Frost Place Competition (Bull City Press, 2024). His work appears in Best New Poets 2023 & 2025, Cincinnati Review, Ecotone, Gulf Coast, Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, Southern Review, and other journals and anthologies. He lives in Baltimore, where he recently served as a Salter Lecturer in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and as a senior editor for The Hopkins Review.