We played to 21 in the years before
we were old enough to want to lie and say
we were 21. Our blackboard education
made us drones, so all we wanted
was motion and momentum. We played
handball every minute we could, up until
the 2nd bell and we flew through
the stairwells like swallows riding updrafts.

We played in the rain, around the puddles
when they were small and in them
when they were warm. We played
in the snow and loved how it recorded
our footfalls after. We played the way our
immigrant Post Office parents worked:
in the rain and in the snow. We paid
junkies to park their cars at odd angles
so we could play by headlights at night.

We wanted motion after gridlocked classrooms,
after lectures that read like sermons, and we found it
on the handball courts. We found handball
courts wherever we wanted, along the broadsides
of schools with our bookbags or our imaginations
for boundaries. We played games in narrow
hallways, mashing knuckles against walls
and walker bys. We were killers of the schoolyard,

coming back from recess with jeans
ripped at the knees, serrated skin, but smiles
in our eyes. We wanted momentum; we wanted
proof that our bodies had physics inside them.
We knew our ratchet and catch bones had gear shifts
the way we switched up the tempo, played Chinese
or American, alternating the rules of the game
according to our bicultural identities. Those

were the good days when everyone was
given do overs because it meant the games
were just longer. We played games to 50,
to 500. In the dangling twilight, we wanted our
games to be as long as our shadows. We wanted
motion and momentum and we never wanted it to
stop.