Three Poems by Justin Carter

Bachelor Party Dunk Contest

My bachelor party wasn’t at some
         seedy strip club or

a casino across the Louisiana border.
         I got BBQ with old friends

who drove six hours
         for short rib Frito pies.

My wife was there, though I suppose
         she wasn’t my wife yet. It wasn’t

the conventional thing.
         A craft beer bar in town

was having a dunk contest
         in its side alley

so we headed over to see
         if any of us could dunk. The rim

was low enough for me to dream,
         but high enough that my best attempt

found my fingers just grazing
         the fringe of the net.

None of us made the final.
         Not that we expected to.

I had this whole plan: pull my phone out,
         mid-dunk, take a selfie

of that triumphant moment. Maybe,
         I thought, the judges

would give me extra points
         for the trick. But I couldn’t

make that leap—sometimes the mind
         gets ahead of the body.

*

Everyone In Des Moines Wants To Talk About Caitlin Clark

& they don’t want to talk about the dissonance
of loving women’s sports at a time
when the governor is pushing the whole state
to the right, an acceleration
toward limiting so many things. This guy
walks up to me in a bar & asks if I
can tell him something he doesn’t know
about Caitlin Clark. I could have said
anything. I could have told him
that birds shoot from her hands when she releases
the logo three. Could have said
she knocked one in off the jumbotron.
Everything’s believable if you have
the right subject matter. My in-laws
complain that the game is on ESPN tonight
& they don’t have ESPN. We could fix that—
I could log them in so they could watch
what might be her collegiate swan song,
but I’m not sure they want that,
to potentially witness her end. No one
does. On Twitter, the sports business guy
makes another uninformed post about NIL
like that might change something,
a different decision. His words
fork no lightning. Tell me, the man says again
because I have stood there & said nothing.

* 

The ROMCO Super Late Model Series

I told my father I wanted to be a racer
at a car show in Houston,
which of course we couldn’t afford,

but we could afford the free tickets
one booth was giving out to something
called the ROMCO Super Late Model Series,

which was running at a track
on the northwest side of the city. That place
had the best cheeseburger I’ve still

ever eaten, my first onion bun. “Play
That Funky Music” blared
from a busted speaker. My parents

made friends with one driver’s wife.
I can’t tell you who won,
but after the checkered flag, when we went

back to the garage, that driver let me
sit in his car &, for a moment,
it felt like dreams might

be attainable. What’s it matter
that he’d finished near the back.
That we’d go there once more,

to see him run an even bigger race
& he’d finish worse than before.
He gave me a signed hat

for the 18-wheeler parts company
he ran up in Oklahoma. Years later,
I was watching a documentary

about a man & his tigers,
& in the background, that hat,
& I thought about that onion bun.

*

Justin Carter is the author of Brazos (Belle Point Press, 2024). His poems have appeared in Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, Sonora Review, and other spaces. Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, Justin currently lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer and editor.