from Jessica Johnson: [untitled]

Catching a glimpse of The Player during a Zoom call, soccer mom’s boss teases, not unkindly, “You’re a soccer mom,” and she can’t tell if this is funny because he can’t see it or because he can.

Soccer mom remembers how, when she was thirteen, The Player’s age, she was actually suicidal imagining she might grow up to be a soccer mom, i.e., a person who drives people to things and waits for them to be done.

If they/them pronouns had been a thing in Idaho in the nineties, she, like The Player, would certainly have used them, and now–

Soccer mom goes to a reading in which a poet dressed as a priest shouts fuego again and again, drawing a crowd uncertain of the context.

Soccer mom tries to dress up normal for the sidelines--clean yoga pants, clean hoodie, as if she’s been exercising but in fact has not and will not.

Soccer mom has been reading Merwin’s translation of Buson and thinking about the poetics of everyday life and also the role of context, the positioning of poets as observers of the crystalline world.

Soccer mom attends a reading at which it’s clear that the hipster imagism of her youth no longer hits in the current context.

Soccer mom wonders again if she has a diagnoseable neurodivergence, or if it’s first person internet videos making her think so.

At The Player’s age, against despair, soccer mom imagined becoming a journalist, before the business model for journalism collapsed, prefiguring the collapse of all that requires a body in a place, perceiving.

“Soccer Mom zuihitsu,” she texts her poetry friends. “Lol, a bad idea.”

After a game spent freezing and cheering on the sidelines, soccer mom will feel as if she herself has run and run, though she has not. She will take a shower and fall asleep.

The Player often calls soccer mom by her first name. It is a way of distancing, of saying no, my entire existence does not depend on you; although when asked why, The Player says, “I just love how your name sounds out loud.” 

Soccer mom practices her formation of one, having given up trying to figure out how to signal on the sideline one’s receptiveness to small talk. 

Soccer mom imagines a film about practice, about this specific practice, the filmic gaze of the balls nestled on cut grass like modern sculptures, and considers whether art can be made about something so insignificant, recalling the 2006 film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, in which the camera closely follows Zinedine Zidane through a single match and how in fact her own attention to The Player approaches this, though The Player is simply an average participant in youth sports during what some days feels like a period of stagnation before the end of America.

Soccer mom goes to a reading where the poets form long lines to buy each other’s books, shake each other’s hands, build each other up–a warmth and vulnerability unheard of in the scenes of her youth, where having taste meant knowing what and who to turn away from, and everyone was always practicing the move. The poets are playing a new formation. 

Soccer mom ekes out a poem in the apolitical lyric style of her schooling about the wild clouds in a shifting formation, about the team in a developing a new formation, as if the clouds were developing and the children were simply transitioning from one shape into another, about archipelagos of  rust growing on a school too old to use, too costly to maintain in its disuse, whose bumpy field is still okay for sub-elite practice, a poem maybe political after all.

Driving home, soccer mom tries to make meaning with The Player. What was fun? What can they learn? She wants to believe they are training for something.