Consolation Bracket: Go, Tigers Poem by Hans Ostrom

When our team played in basketball tournaments,
I was secretly enthralled with the Consolation Bracket.
Winning and losing made no difference in our lives,
couldn’t affect acne or change news from Khe Sanh. The
Championship Bracket offered either losing
without consolation, or a trophy: a toss-up.

Consolation Brackets offer something close enough
to reassurance to seem essential. Aside from
the simplicity of a medium-range jump-shot,
the game didn’t especially interest me. I
was drawn to cheerleaders, the surreal smear
of a crowd’s faces, and odors of cheap perfume,

burnt popcorn, and sweat. I pretended
to be a serious athlete and spirited team member.
It was no use. I had begun to read Poe and Kafka. I
had heard Aretha Franklin sing, “Chain of Fools.”
In my uniform of black and white and orange,
I was inconsolable. The word consolation

sang like a creek. A bracket devoted
solely to such stuff as consolation
beckoned sweetly, seemed to whisper from
iron rafters and dented, rusting lockers.