At My Daughter’s Basketball Practice
Ten children chase the same red, white, and blue ball.
Ten small bodies collapsing toward it
with identical enthusiasm
and identical failure.
Eyes follow it.
Fingers reach.
The ball disappears beneath
a small economy of grabbing hands.
One boy stands outside the swarm—
the one kid not yet convinced
a ball is worth it.
“Be more aggressive!”
a woman shouts from the bleachers.
His mother, I assume.
The pile shifts.
The ball slips out
like a ball from a rugby scrum
and rolls to the boy’s shoes.
For a second he just looks at it.
Then he kicks it hard
back into the swarm
of fingers and shouting.
The woman shouts again.
“You better want it
more than everyone else.”
Already someone does.
Origami Aviary
Spring used to mean orioles.
Now it means my mother
at the kitchen table
folding paper robins.
But the birds keep flying away.
The March wind claims a few.
Shadows move across her face.
She hurries to the screen door.
She tells me about the woods behind the house,
how orioles nested there every spring.
I tell her about my trip to Ireland.
Later she tells me about the birds in Ireland.
A place she’s never been.
Her birds return ruffled,
messages in their beaks,
none of them hers.
My name returns to her, molted.
A blue one dips low—
my son’s middle name.
One purple bird flutters down,
creased like her copy of
The Sun Also Rises.
I study it,
the notes she left in the margins.
I follow her down the dirt path,
unsure whether I am chasing her memory
or it is chasing me.
Spring used to mean birds returning.
Now it means
waiting to see
which names
find their way home.
Patrick G. Roland is a writer and educator living with cystic fibrosis. His work has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize as well as for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. His writing appears in Rattle, South Florida Poetry Journal, HAD, Sky Island, A-minor, and elsewhere. He lives near Pittsburgh with his wife and children.
January House Literary Journal 
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