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Dodger Blues

by Rajesh C. Oza

In memory of Louise Glück, 1943-2023, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature

When Louise was born,
The Dodgers were in Brooklyn.

Before Jackie, a name for the ages,
There were other colorful monikers:
Arky, Augie, and Billy;
Dixie, Mickey, and Frenchy.

This was more than a decade before
Campy, Jackie, Pee Wee, and Sandy
Won the World Series.

This was decades before
Clayton’s Los Azure dreams
Died with Louise’s laments into oblivion,
A pain salved with rebirth in Spring:

“You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.”

(Referencing Glück’s “Wild Iris”)

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MLB All-Posterior Team

1B   Jim Bottomley
2B   Wally Backman
SS   Tommy Butts
3B   Josh Booty

LF   Heinie Manush
CF   Chris Duffy
RF   Phil Reardon

C   Harry Cheek

LHP   Paul Assenmacher
RHP   José Butto, Duff Brumley, Matt Duff

MGR   Heinie Groh

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42

by Phillip W. Wilson

He was not
the best Negro League player
the Dodgers could have signed.
But he was the first
so he had to be better
than legendary.

Where did his calm come from
when he took the field
amidst a rain of insults
hurled like a pyroclastic flow?

How did he show the best
in men
while men showered him
with the worst?

How could he do it
one more day
let alone the next
and then the next?

Whatever it was
burned in him
with such intensity and
white hot heat that,
like Vulcan,
he forged impenetrable armor.

Baseball retired
Jackie Robinson’s 42
for all teams for all time.
The answer to life, the universe
and everything,
is it any wonder
it is the angle at which
sunlight and water
turn into rainbows?

Phillip has recently been published in Poeming Pigeon, and received an Honorable Mention in 2020 in the Oregon Poetry Association’s Contest for new poets. He lives in Beaverton, Ore., with his wife, who is also a poet.