Category: Youth

by Van

I swing,
with eyes: perfect,
brown bat — moving,
above brown dirt,
(above my bare brown feet).
Whistling seams widen my eyes;
the ball pops!
I hear my Dad (jumping off the mound).
He’s really twenty thousand people
cheering for me,
and my home run
(that went all the way over the dugout).

by Caroline Riley

There’s a sports metaphor for everything:
the wind does its thing down the river
and the crowd goes wild. A grand slam
of a Sunday: lumpy pancakes for breakfast
as the day breaks open, twin-yoked, lucky.
Corn and Sugar, those American gods,
or mascots, depending on how you look at them.
Was it just this summer that I felt like a rookie?
Usually just answering the question
is best. Yes. My sister, on the other hand,

is the one who really knows how I feel
about dogs, the way we both sprint
tongues-out towards the fun
that could hurt us, how we share a luck
that means it usually doesn’t —
think me getting on the school bus jacketless
and the clouds parting — a bat’s-crack
of thunder — then it’s gone,
every year on our late-May birthday.

Caroline Riley is a poet and writer from Maryland. She holds an MFA in poetry from West Virginia University. She currently lives in Philadelphia, but continues to support the Washington Nationals.