This week’s poem, by poet-cum-basketball-maven Jefferson Navicky comes on the cusp of March Madness. I love this poem’s visceral muscle memory and sense memory, and the breathless forward momentum of its leaps.

Navicky is the author of four books, most recently “Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands,” a finalist for The Big Other Book Award in Fiction, as well as “Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose,” which won the Maine Literary Award for Poetry. He lives in Midcoast Maine.

Three-Point Shooter

Your body must remember it, do it in sleep,
do it without thinking, must do it
in a split second as an opponent
charges at you, arms raised and screaming
in the midst of a gymnasium full of fans,
parents and friends and pep bands
and police chiefs and teachers and just about
everybody else in town.

It’s the way a ball comes off the fingertips.
Thousands of times, hundreds of mornings up early
before school to shoot in the gym
with your father, even more hundreds of afternoons
and evenings at the city courts with your brother,
in the back of the house behind the garage
in the alley beneath the lamp your father
put up on the tree.

You must do it perfectly, must do it now, square, snap,
flick of the wrist. Forget about guilt, shame, self-consciousness,
what you’ve got that others don’t, forget
and shoot, shoot again, every time
shoot until you’ve shot so many times
you’ve shot yourself far away
you’ve forgotten if
the shot went in, not important, what’s important
is the next shot, which must come soon,
the next shot, square, pop, shoot,
follow through the dark Ohio night
lit by lights, lit by owls, lit by loneliness,
lit by nothing, lights out.

– Jefferson Navicky

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Three-Point Shooter,” copyright ©2023 by Jefferson Navicky, was originally published in Tupelo Quarterly. It appears by permission of the author.