Each Wednesday, Editor's Choice brings you a poem from a new book selected as a must-read. Our feature editor this week is Jennifer Chang.
Stephanie Young
after the Warriors won last night
we were talking about sports riots generally
you think it's a bad reason to burn a cop car.

I said there's no bad reason to burn a cop car
you said oh come on. it was late.
the end of a long day. you had work

then rehearsal. I had bargaining
then plans I couldn't cancel but did
when the cramps came on

I lay on the couch and listened to fireworks
waited for you to come home
watch the game fast forward

through commercials. we already knew
how it turned out, how it was going to.
those are the breaks: the way things happen.

shit. fate. when everything drops out
but the drums. Steph Curry off the dribble.
Steph Curry off the catch. Iguodala

along the perimeter. Iguodala everywhere.
sometimes you catch a break, a stroke of luck
sometimes you wear them down

I didn't watch basketball much before this
I've never actually burned a cop car
you've got me there. I know people have

they will. the breaks are about inevitability
the way things are is the way it goes
what constitutes a break, what makes a break for it

life is short. and life is long. how a thing may contain
the opposite direction of wherever it's headed

a lion that will fly. With his face backward
my favorite line from Troilus and Cressida

I think it is about time
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A formal, black-and-white portrait of Alice Dunbar Nelson
"Poem of the Week: The Idler by Alice Dunbar Nelson"

"Her debut publication, a miscellany of poems and stories, Violets and Other Tales, appeared when she was only 20. 'The Idler' comes from that collection. The sympathetic portrait reveals the young writer’s independence of class- or faith-bound moral judgments—and a bold though unobtrusive use of metrical variation to express character and action."

via THE GUARDIAN
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Title page of the first printing of the King James Bible, 1611
What Sparks Poetry:
Martha Collins on Psalm 19

"One night when I was nine years old, when the stars and moon were shining brightly, my mother took me to the window and read the first verses of the 19th Psalm to me. That was a long time ago, so the version I heard was the King James, which is still....the translation I like to read. I was, as we would say now, blown away. I had heard and loved music all my short life, but I had never heard anything as beautiful as that Psalm."
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