by James Finn Garner
As we take a pause for the All-Star Break
And the promoters fall over themselves,
There’s a confession I feel obliged to make:
I haven’t given a shit since age 12.
Home Run Derby
by Dave Landsberger
Much like most of life, to be enjoyed it must be muted.
Best to enjoy the thronging, the boozing, the outmuscling
and tearing at t-shirts with cuticles
for the simplest of circles—silently.
Like cousins’ command chain while lost in a mystical and kid-appropriate forest
the rules of the bleachers are a cartoon-island democracy,
constituted with the concerns of treehouse parliaments:
escape routes, beach balls, dibs.
Lest not be forgotten those valiantly volunteering for target practice!
Birthday donkeys in the bleachers,
tails and nails clusterbombing down—
is it fireworks? Or is it cowhide? American meteorites?
Cheering harmonizing with ooing and ahhing.
From mitt, to hand, to bat, to sky, to television,
the home run lodges itself in the muted “O” of the play-by-playman’s mouth,
domesticated for a brief lease,
socializing its achievement in banister-blazing bars named for grandmothers.
If Mussolini had come to America,
if he tossed free shoes from his trucks down these neon American vistas,
it would be something like this,
something like the joyous handout that is the Home Run Derby—
the concoction of the convenience store parking lot cabinet, the basement brain trust,
the patriotic powwow and its unfurling of its flag/tarp
as the switchboard hand hinges down the cover to the missile defense system.
Today, in the beefy cheesy burrito commercial
I learned that catching home runs is honorable.
It suggested the experience was singular,
but without audio the burrito steamed triumphant
and now I sit shellacked, hungry, and deafened,
staring through the TV savagely as my attention turns its gajillionth channel.
Dave Landsberger’s first chapbook, “Whoa, Yeah, Baby,” can be read at floatingwolfquarterly.com. This poem first appeared on the Windy City sports website, ChicagoSide, where Dave is the poet-in-residence.
Baseball’s a Thing of the Heart
by Bill McCurdy
The gossamer wings of baseball soul
Float gently in the breeze,
Soaring high, from here to the sky,
On the winds of thoughts that please.
We grew up reflecting, wistfully back,
To moments measurable in time,
From Big Six Christy to Babe Ruth’s 60,
Each memory soared sublime.
Then came the voice of Barber
To mind sketch on our brains
The frames of sculpted sentiment,
As “the catbird seat” explains.
We bought the face of heroes
On colored baseball cards
To float in what we could not see,
In the words of the radio bards.
We took these winds and ran with them
On vacant lots and streets.
Our bodies hugged the earth’s sweet crust,
But our spirits soared in sheets.
In sheets of high plane color
Filled in by all who soared,
Our souls reached out and found our wings,
Life’s breath was not ignored.
And now when things like drugs and greed
Hi-tech us from all corners,
Attacking all the sweet spots,
Sometimes I fear we’re goners.
Gone from the floating hope
For a better world above
That we once found with baseball,
Bare feet – and a ragged glove.
So fight for all worth keeping.
Baseball gave us our start,
There needs be no loss-weeping,
For our game’s a thing of the heart.
Bill McCurdy writes about baseball, with a particular focus on the great state of Texas, at The Pecan Park Eagle.
The Grass Problem Among Today’s Youth
by James Finn Garner
Wrigley is now “Fillmore Midwest”
As Docker-clad Boomers shake ass.
Why not? It’s not like the Cubs of today
Play any worse on hay than on grass.
Check out this photo at IvyEnvy.com to see what a weekend of Roger Waters and Kenny Chesney concerts did to the playing field at the Friendly Confines.
Fenway Park at Season’s End: Wally the Green Monster
by Rich Bowering
October. Wally lights a cigarette,
Takes a long drag, stares at the glowing tip.
Sits somewhere in Section 42. It’s quiet.
He can still hear his mother’s shrill yap:
Don’t have babies with people.
But he did, and that night of unprotected sex
Produced little Jimmy, with greenish skin, who
Hangs his big square head as he walks down the hallway at school,
Half-boy half-mascot. The shotgun marriage was over
In six months – a freak for mascots, she left Wally for
Dave, the Self-Denying Fish. Finally settled for (of course)
The Fightin’ Mule, encountered outside a porn trade show.
Jimmy doesn’t want to learn the trade.
But what else will he do? Same attitude as Lobster-Boy’s kid.
Flicking his Lucky Strike, Wally swallows the last of his
Jack Daniels and, groping down the concourse to piss,
Stops to hose down a wall. No matter.
Minutes later he stumbles across center field, and words bear down
On him like a necklace of tires: Divorced. Absent father. Clown.
Wally knows that mascots are really just rowdy tourists
In the human world, covered with the foreign dust of ball fields:
Green and fuzzy! Spouting macabre caricatures of human heads,
And grotesque limbs! Flashing huge animal claws and teeth!
Looking up at the scoreboard before entering the secret door
And going to bed for the winter, he whips a crowd of pigeons
Into a great frenzy. One day his son will look in the mirror and see
Behind his own green head the shadows of a thousand human faces
Waiting for his cue. He will hear in that moment the roar that signifies
Both icon life and icon death.
Rich Bowering is the author of Big Fire at Spahn Ranch.