Church Softball

Those nights it was all right
to be in league with Presbyterians,
Dad said.  We always went along 

because the ball fields had
concessions (every Christian liked hot dogs,
Dad said).  With ecumenical relish

green upon my lips, I skipped
mitt-first and tripping willfully
behind the dugouts with the sons

of half-correct sectarian shortstops
and way-out left fielders
whom Dad and the deacons would beat that night.

Far behind the fence in foul ground,
we rolled, ran up the pile
of extra infield dirt, around

the backstop, through pick-up
games with tennis balls
and broomsticks—Canseco versus

A-Rod versus Clemens (not yet
at the age of accountability,
these names we injected

into our contests naturally)—
schisms of bean balls,
close plays, and sola scriptura synods

of pouty player-umpires.  All
the while, wives and mothers attended
the games, seated in one long row

just behind the fence, pillows
of flesh squeezing between the straining
crossed fabric of their lawn chairs.  They

laughed and clapped together while sons
and fathers, each invisible to the other,
decided who was safe and who was out.

RYAN HARPER is a visiting assistant professor in Colby College’s Department of Religious Studies. He is the author of The Gaithers and Southern Gospel: Homecoming in the Twenty First Century (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) and My Beloved Had a Vineyard, winner of the 2017 Prize Americana in poetry (Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2018). Some of his recent poems and essays have appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Wild Roof Journal, River Heron Review, Maine Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, LETTERS, Cimarron Review, Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere.