The headline doesn’t faze me, stretching
in my underwear and thinking of Rome:
the arch a hollow monument.
The local company that extracts blocks
for ice palaces in Saint Paul
built a small castle on our town beach.
Sneakers squeak on the wooden floor
as ten men, and boys becoming men,
huff and shout and surge toward one hoop
and then the other. On the flip side of the divider,
children create a cacophony of of ricocheting balls,
orange orbs bouncing off walls, backboards, rims.
The last time I walked anywhere
in a group was Halloween, 2019.
You were dressed as a baseball
player and I was a beat reporter:
three-piece suit and spectacled
with a panama hat and a flip pad
where I recorded your afternoon
quips punctuated by the popping
of double-bubble and Mom yelling
to remind us both to say thank you.
How I got my Cold War epithet
all started before the ’06 season.
To give back, Coach signed us up
to donate blood. Later that week the team
was expected to exercise its sympathy.
“Abstain and hydrate, boys,” he advised,
a few days leading up to the drive.
To the campus we could never afford, but crept through sometimes,
not on nothing nefarious, just hooping with a cousin
& his friends, & some boys who been spoon fed
since they were twinkles in an iris. I recall like yesterday’s
refuse, the way them White boys watched you climb so high
above their heads, just to shove you down at the peak.
“...because they are kind and almost meaningless.”
i tell him that i like the one with the skeletons playing
baseball: one skeleton batter, one skelton catcher, and
one skeleton umpire, calling a strike. he’s brought in his grateful
dead ticket stubs to show me, spread them out on a table in
the breakroom of the grocery store.
there’s never been another living in
the anthropocene like him. try it —
afraid to pay the fee of playing him
twice a year, jackson lit the candle
and locked the door. then the rest
got scared, the referees, david stern,
and a growing television audience all
tuned in for m.j., so they had to call
him “the worm.”
in baseball a pitch
thrown too far inside
is an invitation
to a fight
thrown just right
it is a merely a reminder
to quit crowding the plate
When I was 9,
I remember playing soccer
With a plastic black and white ball.
Always, at whoever’s house, teeth marks:
a chunk chewed from the stitches
or the side, the smooth N or F
we would worry with our fingers
before testing our strength against
fall’s yawning acreage, a Hail Mary
every down. Sometimes waterlogged
from a rain barrel or above-ground pool,
often scrawled with permanent marker
across the seam (nickname, lightning).
█ a post-game press ███████████████████████████ gesture ███ █████ ██ a message to fans ███████████████████████ poor performance ████ ████████████████████████████████████████████████ will not be tolerated.
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We stand in the gloom of April:
pearls of ice, strands of snow,
entire necklaces dipped in heaven’s
Why is the crude swell
of nostalgia like
cresting sun and falling darkness
kissing?