» Poetry

Inside the cold of January…

Travis Mossotti

Inside the cold of January where my daughter plays soccer in a converted warehouse—the old loading dock permanently shut behind the goal where the goalie waits for the play to start up again, knees bent and ready—and the other team has driven a long way from the outskirts of outer-outer ring suburbs built on old dirt farms where every constructed thing down to the Dollar Stores and Amazon distribution centers seems fixed with Elmer’s glue atop tornado prone fields, and their parents watch the game as seriously as hedge fund managers might watch the Bloomberg ticker. In the minds of these parents, the ref is crooked, but I know he’s just the guy working the concession stand on other nights who probably has other things on his mind (like the pilot light of his furnace) and good for him, I think. Although the parents on my daughter’s team are not thinking about the game, they watch, hoping their daughters don’t get injured in any meaningful way. Like me, they’re thinking about brushing up on their French before a trip to Paris this spring and calculating which prep school will offer the highest yield. A little girl in the crowd, maybe seven years old, from the other team is not watching her big sister play, but she’s singing the refrain to a song she knows by heart—loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to be disruptive—and her voice is okay and I’m thinking how she might be a young Adele in the making. With the right training and sufficient ambition and lucky breaks—I mean talent can come from anywhere, right? I don’t mean to look down my nose at them. At the words they say and how poorly they take the loss and how long their trip home must feel with their daughters’ disappointment hued like the inside of a red rose that will never open. How that little girl with the voice will keep practicing the notes she knows might help her escape and what her escape might look like: Vegas, five shows per week? The well-oiled roulette wheels on the casino floors spinning in unison as the little ivory balls start to dance back and forth between red and black.