Half and One publishes my poem “The Ball Kid Faints.”

Turkish tennis player Zeynep Sönmez assists ball kid at Australian Open, 1/18/26.

I'm always thrilled to get a poem published. But I am over the moon to have my recent poem "The Ball Kid Faints" published today. Thank you Half and One literary magazine for publishing it.

The poem is part of a new sequence I've been working on that casts tennis ball kids as something akin to Fagin's gang from Oliver Twist.

This particular ball-kid poem is based on real events --climate change & ICE-related--that happened late last January in Melbourne and Minneapolis, respectively.

The events are relevant this week as air quality veers into the hazardous range and Trump’s ICE agents killed two men, one man in Houston, 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and one man in Maine, 25-year-old Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero

Also: Such a hot illustration from Half and One.

Illustration by Allen B. Thangkhiew at Half and One.