It is my honor to present to you Issue 2 of the Under Review. It’s hard to believe just over five months ago we were celebrating the launch of this journal with the party and reading for Issue 1. It was a night I won’t soon forget: family, friends, the vibrant literary community of the Twin Cities, and our lovely contributors came together at the Black Hart of Saint Paul in the Midway neighborhood and filled the private bar to the rafters.
Read Moreclay pebble court
reserved hit the ball
against the wall by the
web of this hand, I serve
concrete to black skin
culled from forearm to
wrist to racket hit the ball
against the wall
Fathers tucked their newspapers under their elbows,
And arose to applaud the Celtics, and the stoic and regal Bill Russell,
Who was winning for Boston, despite fighting every neighborhood except Roxbury;
Russell couldn’t get a home in a white neighborhood, but established estate in the paint,
Hauling in 24 boards while setting the pace.
Listen:
My mother texts me from my dead father’s phone on the third day of the National Football league draft. She promises she only texts me from his phone as if that will placate the sheer terror that overwhelms me every time his name pops up on my lock screen.
He’s been dead less than two months.
Too soon, mother. Too soon.
Read MoreGone eight months, I still write his name
on my scorecard. He’d shake his fist
after each flubbed shot—one off a tree,
two in the woods, driving his ball
On New Year’s Eve I sit in a hotel bed
with my dad, who’s taken me
on visitation this week,
watching stuntman Robbie Maddison,
all decked out in Red Bull blue,
attempt to jump his motorbike up a ramp
and onto a ten-story building. He has to hit
On May 29, 1985, my father saved me from death by soccer. In fact, he did the life-saving a few days prior, in altogether non-dramatic fashion, when, over dinner, he forbade me from attending the European Champions' Cup Final between Juventus and Liverpool at the Heizel Stadium in Brussels. As a result, I wasn't among the 39 who died there after an assault by Liverpool fans, followed by a stampede and a deadly crush in the section where I would have been.
Read Morea continent away from ringside,
cinema seat at a further remove.
To prepare, I dog-ear Liebling’s
The Sweet Science, returning
to when people of all classes
rubbed shoulders to savor hook
To keep us out of trouble, my mom put us in karate class. I hated the pajama pants and all the superstition. But before I knew it, I was lined up and bowing to some guy in a karate gi with an American flag design. Since Mom was frugal, we took classes in the recreation room of the church. Sensei Gomez only charged $20 a month.
Over time, I enjoyed it. I made friends with Freddy, or Speedy as we called him. Like a champion chess player, he would predict your move, evade and strike you all in a blink.
Read MoreNo one can blame him for wanting
to play for the Boston Celtics. I myself
would have played for the Boston Celtics
had I grown up a little differently
and a little taller. Forgive me,
for my father has taught me
He was sitting on the couch when he got the call. They called it a couch though in actuality it was a futon left by the previous renters of the apartment and perhaps even the renters before them. No one knew the origins of the futon. No one had been around long enough to trace all of its stains.
Read MoreThis was the time I had a tough training run on the Arkansas River in which I dumped my crew of fellow trainees into Three Forks rapid, into rocks and, unknowingly, into rebar, sharp and ugly metal. Two of the crew were unnerved from the rebar, the rest from the amount of rocks they had to swim through before I got them back in the raft. Two hoisted themselves back into the boat as I reached for the others.
Read MoreAsthmatic, my father couldn’t run
the length of the yard, spent his boyhood
winning breath from an oxygen tent.
He learned, instead, to read whole stories
from statistics in the Baseball Almanac:
shutouts, short seasons, sacrifice hits.
This is about the old lion and the young lion. This is about the moderate and the progressive. This is about a father who’s the same age as the four girls who got blown up in Birmingham and a son who married a white woman in Montgomery without the city bothering to blink. This is about the soldier and chef who raised a college professor.
But it’s not about that.
Read MoreOn the tennis courts, Edward was the new guy—the greenhorn, the rookie—though not necessarily because of his age. At 64, he figured he was on the young end, but maybe not the youngest. They were playing doubles on two courts—eight guys altogether. He was the eighth. The others had apparently been playing every morning since they (he and his wife, Ellen, God rest her soul) moved to the Cape.
Read MoreAgain, the sheriff’s boat looking,
looking, covering at barely
a chug the part of the gorge
where we row -- it tries
to glimpse a t-shirt, a shoe.
Now, at the end of our practice, revs up,
speeds downriver, making a wake
that gathers form and froth
I wandered into the grand ballroom of the Genesis Convention Center in Gary, Indiana, where Bob Uecker was the featured guest at a sports card show. Among the smell of egg muffins and beer farts, overweight middle-aged guys hovered over three rows of tables full of plastic-wrapped card displays and open binders. Piles of sawdust and roofing nails from last week’s home show littered the same red, blue, and yellow kaleidoscope carpet as my friend Jared’s bar mitzvah thirty years ago.
Read Morein 1979 I discover
I cannot roller skate
and that in this pursuit at least
I am in the minority
& I hesitate to receive the past week I’m more of myself than ever
I stare at my reflection for eleven. uninterrupted minutes & decide
this place, my childhood home became a different person
Chris McCormick is the author of The Gimmicks, (Harper, 2020) and Desert Boys (Picador, 2016), winner of the 2017 Stonewall Book Award—Barbara Gittings Literature Award. His essays and stories have appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Tin House, and Ploughshares. He grew up in the Antelope Valley on the California side of the Mojave Desert, and earned his BA from the University of California, Berkeley.
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