The winter issue of the Under Review has become a very welcome New Year’s tradition for me. The calendar turns over, and before I’ve even given up on the several resolutions that I’ve promised are going to stick “this year!” it’s already time to load a new issue into the publishing machine and celebrate the next batch of incredibly talented writers.
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I mean the kind of poem
that from the jump tells you just what it’s about:
I’m writing this for you, my son,
screaming your song in the kitchen.
James saw they had swapped his old high school football field from grass to astroturf this year on Facebook. His buddy had tagged him in a post by the local reporter, with pictures of the contractors covered in the little black pellets. Behind them were ten-feet-tall roll-ups of earth, the last remnants of the sod James had helped set all those years ago.
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The Oakland Coliseum, home of the Oakland Athletics, is, by all accounts, ugly. Owners of the various sports teams that have resided at the Coliseum, have more colorful words to describe the stadium that was built in 1966 in the hopes of attracting professional sports to the East Bay.
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meatsmoke & sweat
damngood i am today
eat with hands
i am not dead but i’ll believe
anything offered
in hand with a free
pulled pork sandwich
The hat I left at the rink & need
to keep my head dry tomorrow
came from Florida through a storm
& I have not. My father got it
The hairy goalkeeper, who has a forehead like a knuckle, stands over me, saying, “You’re gonna miss, faggot,” and my teammate Rhodes Noggelsmann, a usually soft-spoken, cerebral kind of guy, steps in and says, “Back off, Australopithecus assholus,”
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When people first see my shot, there’s a bit of head scratching. Because of my shooting arm. My form starts out fine–a good base in the legs, elbow under the ball, ball off my palm–but ends too quickly, a flick of the wrist before my arm fully extends. It looks rushed, anxious. With two normal arms, it would be queer mechanics. This can play to my advantage.
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Should I mention the latebloomers,
how they purple September?
though it’s true: sometimes buds
shrink into early frost.
Sometimes it never happens.
There is a curious vacuum just after anything breaks, a brief untroubled stillness that anger and mourning can’t yet disturb, and in it what is seen most clearly is whatever has been lost. O’Hara first saw the ground rush toward him, the infield’s pebbly red-brown filling up his vision, then in that improbable serenity that sets in just after realizing something is terribly wrong, his last moments of safety were recalled in a kind of vivid, morbid slow-motion:
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(K. Protagonist)
Like calving glaciers, chunks of code, of shale,
Nude descending a staircase, she shuffles
Stiff new cards without halving arch and
Release. What other game was there anymore.
No one to ask about the rules, except
The computer, that narcissist.
I have been running long distances for a decade, riding my bike, and swimming in open water for six years. My mind often wandered while training for endurance sports like running or triathlons.
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After the Spurs won the lottery, they told him, “I hope you like barbeque.” There’s a big spread in the box suite in the Alamodome, the stadium built for a football team that never came, too big for basketball, the nosebleeds too far from the court to make out who is who.
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After landing at Paris’s Orly airport, Mary Anne cleared customs, made her way to the domestic terminal, and found a seat. It would be hours until she boarded her next flight, destination Clermont-Ferrand. That city was in the middle of France, a place she’d never been.
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I wish I could remember it
frame by frame. Center-left,
nearer to the center field circle
than the half moon atop the 18.
MILE 11
Tall, graceful runners passed by me as I stumbled my way down the Ocean Parkway towards Coney Island. The morning’s ominous dark cloud cover finally came into fruition and a small pitter patter of rain dropped every few seconds onto my sweat-stained shoulders.
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I must bury the boy again,
who leaps into my limbic system.
My tongue. My eyes.
My spine and violence. I dream.
In a 1990 Sports Illustrated article, Ron Fimrite called the 1951 9-0 University of San Francisco Dons the “best football team you never heard of – unbeaten and unsung.”
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Spring is the windiest time of year in New Mexico. Each spring, when green catkins bloom on the cottonwood at yard’s edge, and flat, triangular-shaped leaves shimmer in the wind and emit a rustling sound calm and peaceful like water flowing in a brook, they would put in the garden—the father and his two sons, Pete and Tomás.
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