by Jim Daniels
Saturday afternoon, alone in the living room
I crouched on the floor to watch
the Tigers lose another game.
Don Wert let a ball roll through
his legs and down the line in left.
You pimp, I cried
as the winning run scored.
My mother dropped laundry, grabbed my arm:
what’d you call him?
Pimp, I mumbled. I was nine
and about to learn a new word.
My mother turned off the tv.
A man sells a woman’s body.
I thought about that for a long time:
Don Wert missed a ground ball.
Don Wert did not sell women’s bodies.
Don Wert was not a good third baseman.
Don Wert was not a pimp.
It would be a couple more years
before I thought much about women’s bodies
before I etched a g for girls
into my dresser drawer knob I used
to dial in my dreams.
That night I pinned Don Wert’s baseball card
to my dartboard and took my pleasure.
Pimp, I whispered, pimp.
Jim Daniels is the Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, where he has taught creative writing for 30 years.