Tag: baseball

Two Poems by Baruch November

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Lives upon Lives

Contractors affix buildings on top
of buildings in Jerusalem.
Occupants below must clear out
for all the years it takes
to finish adding
to sandstone structures.

I have lived lives upon lives.
I want to go back
to when I was certain—it was my twenties.
I dismissed many great women.
Someone greater was always coming along.

I have been an inept architect.
I built for one who does not live
with the truth of others.
I built for starlight,
not shelter.

I built for ghosts
of those never born.
I built a hollow home
for howling winds.

I built a demise
in waiting
and thought it
a masterpiece
towering over
the settled lives
of others.

*

The Tiger of Detroit

Every one of his home runs
in 1938 was hit off of Hitler.
Rage transformed
into urgency
in the batter’s box. 

He wanted so much to amaze those
who called him Christ-killer,
sheenie, kike, pant-presser.
They say only Jackie Robinson
had it worse.

When he did not play on Yom Kippur,
he electrified the fasting
congregation: tall shul doors
opened to reveal
the tiger slipping through.

The rabbi pounded his pulpit for silence.
Women swiveled their necks,
children stood on their chairs
to catch a glimpse of Greenberg–

A man who never played cards,
knowing his teammates
would holler if a Jew
threw down a full house,
a royal flush—
taking all their earnings
home to buy his wife
a necklace bright
as the closest
strand of stars.

*

Baruch November’s latest full-length book of poems, The Broken Heart is the Master Key, will be released this August. An earlier collection of poems, entitled Dry Nectars of Plenty, co-won BigCityLit’s chapbook contest in 2003. His works have been featured in Paterson Literary Review, Tiferet Journal, Lumina, NewMyths.com, and The Forward. His poem “After Esav” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is a host and organizer of the Jewish Poetry Reading Series, which has featured poets such as Linda Pastan and Grace Schulman. For more than a decade, Baruch November has taught courses in Shakespeare, poetry, and writing at Touro University in Manhattan.

Three Poems by Ann Kammerer

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Robin

We sat around
my kitchen table,
my brothers in town
for Christmas,
Mom and Dad
long divorced
and dead
for decades.

They talked about
high school.
They talked about
sports.
They talked about
being All-Region
in baseball,
and how
they could’ve been
All-State,
if only Mom
had married
someone else.

“We would’ve
been better,” Freddie said.

“Yeah,” Charlie said.
“We would’ve been
All-Stars.”

Charlie drank.
Freddie smoked.
They went
back and forth
calling Mom an idiot
for not marrying
a college player
named Robin Roberts,
a stand-out pitcher
recruited by the Phillies
and enshrined
in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

“She dated him you know.”
Charlie leaned in,
his head tipped,
his eyebrows raised
just like Dad
used to do
when he tried
to make a point.

“I doubt it,” I said.
“Like Mom made
things up.
You know.
To get Dad mad.”

Freddie leaned in, too,
his jaw squared.

“She wouldn’t lie
‘bout that.” he said.

Charlie nodded.
He rapped the table
with his knuckles.

“Yeah,” he said.
“She wouldn’t do that.
Never.”

They fixed
on each other,
their eyes wide.

“Yeah,” Freddie said.
“It could’ve been perfect.”

Reseating their baseball caps,
they listed the keepsakes
they found tucked away
in Mom’s dresser drawer,
the college programs
with Roberts’ name underlined,
the ’49 rookie card,
the mint condition
Topps and Bowmans,
and the ‘53 baseball mag,
with “Wonder Boy” Roberts
on the color cover,
sizing up his pitch.

“She had
everything,” Freddie said.
“All his cards,
all those stories,
all those things
about him,
about his kids,
about his wife.”

Freddie paused.
He blinked and looked
out the window.

“Like that could’ve
been us,” Charlie said.
“Imagine it.”

Chugging their beers,
they opened two more,
saying they could’ve had
a star-quality Dad,
someone who taught them
how to throw,
catch, and hit,
someone who
coached them,
instead of a dad
in worn suits
and scuffed wingtips
who never even
tossed them a pitch
when they played ball
with neighbor kids
in a fenced back yard.

*

Curation

Mom needed money.
Dad wouldn’t give
her any.
He said she spent
whatever she got
on stupid things
instead of what
she should.

Her friend Charlotte
told her to have
a garage sale.
She said Mom
would be surprised
at how much money
she could make.

“People like to buy
other people’s junk,” she said.
“I’m sure your husband
has a lot of it.”

Mom emptied cupboards
and rummaged through
dresser drawers.
She pillaged closets
and dug deep
into crannies
and crawl spaces.
She gathered anything
deemed useless
or useful,
not caring
whose it was,
just as long
as it would sell.

“No one’s gonna miss
this stuff,” she said.
“Especially your brothers.”

Freddie and Charlie
had moved out
the summer I finished
seventh grade,
getting an apartment
and taking college classes,
vying to avoid
the Vietnam draft.
They left stuff behind,
their closets jammed,
saying they’d come get things,
as soon as they were ready.

“If they wanted
this crap so bad
they would’ve taken it,” Mom said.
“Finders Keepers, right?”

We cleared their closets
and set things on
the scuffed plank floor,
creating a line-up
of boxes and bags.

Mom split the tape
and opened
a small cardboard box
labeled “CHARLIE’S CARDS.”

“Well looky here.”
Her eyes reflected
a colorful collection
of rectangular cards,
the ones paid for
with nickels and dimes,
originally packaged
with a stale stick
of pink powdery gum.

“I betcha there’s
a Mickey Mantle
in here,” Mom said.
“Or a Willie Mays.”

She held up each card,
looking for bends
or worn edges,
making stacks
of MVPs,
sluggers,
and pitchers,
a few catchers
in between.
Lopsided frowns
crossed her face
as she discarded
dispelled prospects
and hopefuls
in a jumbled pile.

“Help me,” she said.
“Let’s see
what we got.”

I set down my Coke
and stood beside her,
a light breeze
carrying the roar
of the distant highway.
Our fingers nimble,
our eyes fixed,
we worked in sync,
silently sorting
the cardboard portraits,
a curated gallery
of young men
in pinstripes
and ball caps,
poised on green fields
against the bluest of skies.

*

Rookie

My brother Charlie
got fired from his sales job
after getting too drunk
at a Christmas party
and spouting off.

“My boss had it
in for me,” he said.
“Everyone says
it’s bullshit.”

Charlie sat around
for a month.
He went to bars
and sat around
some more.
He got drunk
and called me
all the time,
ranting about
his ex-wife,
ranting about
some college girl
he picked up,
calling her a slut.

“I don’t want
to hear it,” I said.

Charlie got foul mouthed.
I hung up.
He called back.

“Hey.
Listen to me,” he said.
You’re supposed
to be my sister.”

I hung up again.
He kept calling back.
I turned off the phone.

Six months later,
Charlie ran out
of money,
his prospects dry,
his savings thin.
His phone got
disconnected
so I went by his house,
the lawn overgrown,
the front door
kicked in.

I found him
in the back room
sunk in a vinyl recliner,
ringed by beer cans,
empty chip bags,
and crusted-over bowls
of beans and franks.

“Why you here?”
Charlie stared
at an ancient TV
coated with dust.
“The Tigers,” he said.
“They’re on.”

A sour smell
hung in the air,
the carpet squishy
beneath my feet.
I pulled over
a folding chair
and sat for a minute
on the torn sticky seat,
asking how he was.

He lifted his filthy ball cap
and smoothed his
gray-blonde hair,
his skin sallow
with tungsten light.

“Doing good,” he said.
He dunked his hand
in a Styrofoam cooler
filled with melting ice
and Miller Light.
“You know, though,
I still can’t believe it.”

He looked at me
and shook his head.
I asked him what.

“You know what.”
Charlie slurred,
starting in again
about his baseball cards,
how he could’ve
cashed them in,
been rich,
if only Mom
hadn’t sold them
at that garage sale
years ago
when he was away
at college.

“Man oh man,” he said.
“Mickey Mantle.
Rod Carew.
Hank Aaron.
Plus all those
rookie cards.
Goddamn her.”

Charlie picked
at the cracked vinyl
on the arms of his chair.
He bit his dry lip
and said yepper yep,
once, then twice.

“Goddamn it.”
Rising in his seat,
his eyes blistering,
Charlie threw his beer
as a Tiger struck out,
ending the inning
one run behind,
with two men stranded
on base.

*

Ann Kammerer lives in the Chicago area, having relocated from her home state of Michigan. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared or are coming in Fictive Dream, One Art, Open Arts Forum, Bright Flash Literary Review, Major 7th Magazine, Workers Write!, Chiron Review, Thoughtful Dog, and Ekphrastic Review, and in anthologies by Crow Woods Publishing and Querencia Press. Her chapbook collections of narrative poetry include “Yesterday’s Playlist” (Bottlecap Press, 2023), “Beaut” (Kelsay Books, 2024), “Friends Once There” (Impspired, 2024), and “Someone Else” (Bottlecap Press, 2024). You can find her here: annkammerer.com

Phanatic by John Arthur

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Phanatic

the day you swung my Louisville
Slugger at me and I caught it
with my bare hands
you smacked my bare ass
while Jimmy held my pants
at my ankles and I was
getting hard, harder
each week from dead
lifts, lunges, and power cleans
until mom poured a gallon
of milk on my head,
the lactose sticky on my skin
as I let it soak in
laying there on the dogsmell couch
where dad drunkslept during Phillies
games. we were there at Citizens
Bank Park when they broke
the record for most
innings played in a game,
at infinity, and everyone
left the stadium except for us.
They’re still playing.
We’re still there.

*

John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. His work has appeared in Rattle, trampset, Maudlin House, Third Wednesday, and other places. His band is called The Deafening Colors.

At my Grandson’s Baseball Tournament in Myrtle Beach by Steven Luria Ablon

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At my Grandson’s Baseball Tournament in Myrtle Beach

We have come here before the first game
for breakfast to the famous Waffle House
teeming with families patiently waiting
with small children as the grills heat up,

and workers whir around tables.
My pleasure this morning is breakfast
with my daughter during her divorce.
She says these are the thinnest

best waffles she’s ever had.
I agree. We go every morning.
She thought her marriage would
never collapse, He wouldn’t beat

their son, have an affair, say he hated her,
complain that her work as a novelist
brought in little money. She wasn’t
slim enough. She blames herself.

Her life is sorrowful. She is as lonely
as a dog left by highway.
I wish I could take her back to her childhood.
I wish I could take her for waffles every day.

*

Steven Luria Ablon, poet and adult and child psychoanalyst, teaches child psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and publishes widely in academic journals. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines such as The Brooklyn Review, Ploughshares, and The Princeton Arts Review. He has published five full collections of poetry including Tornado Weather (Mellen Poetry Press, 1993), Flying Over Tasmania (The Fithian Press, 1997), Blue Damsels (Peter E Randall Publisher, 2005), Night Call (Plain View Press, 2011), and, most recently, Dinner in the Garden (Columbia, South Carolina, 2018).

Two Poems by Joseph Chelius

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The Franklin Institute

All the wonders of science and invention
stood before us in the distance: if only
we could decode the pattern of the Parkway lights—
our grandmother in her green coat and hat,
the scent of Jean Nate,
leading the three of us with our blond crew cuts
on the day’s expedition: the trolley ride
into town; soft pretzels from a vendor.
And then, as amused Ben Franklin looked on,
peering through his tiny spectacles,
our stepping into the crosswalk—
the talk so many years later
not of the Planetarium, nor even the Giant Heart,
but our awe of tall buildings, the bewildering
phenomenon of commerce and traffic;
our linking hands as if entering
a panorama—sun glinting off metal and chrome.

*

Stopping Between Errands to Watch Little League Baseball

Forget the hardware store,
the broken clapper
on the running toilet.
And the wilting asparagus,
the half-gallon of mint chocolate
sweating it out
in the sauna of the trunk.
Unlike my fellow spectators in the stands,
I have nothing invested here:
no regard for the score
or, as I’d had years before,
no son to cheer as he stands at bat
or maintains his poise on the pitcher’s mound.
But like some roving ambassador,
a retired neighbor filling his days,
I have taken these moments
to play anonymous fan
for both the reds and the yellows
as they compete on the field.
To feel the sun on my arms,
on the back of my neck,
to be a man interrupted—
kindly, avuncular,
without a list or an agenda,
who if only just briefly
on a Saturday afternoon
can put out of mind
the unpacking of groceries
and querulous fixtures.
Can resist even the call
of the pent-up mower—
shrill and exacting,
that disciplines grass.

*

Joseph Chelius works as a principal editor for a health care communications company. His poetry has appeared in journals and magazines such as Commonweal, Poetry East, Poet Lore, Rattle, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and THINK. He has published two full-length collections with WordTech editions in Cincinnati: The Art of Acquiescence (2014) and Crossing State Lines (2020).

Three Poems by Richard Bloom

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Dear Larry Levis

Every forty minutes, the baby birds cry out for food.
Their beaks wide open,
Their throats, pink and red, like the throats of flowers.

If a berry drops from their beak, they can’t pick it up.
They’re just like the old people at the Hamilton Senior Center.
They can’t feed themselves, either.

And when the baby birds are satisfied, they no longer cry.
The flower of their desert colored throats close.
They puff out their scanty feathers.

What happened to their parents? They’re always better off with their parents.
Now I guess, I’m their mother.
Dear Larry Levis, my spine remembers wings.

*

Ballet in the trees

The sky is a washed-out blue.
The grass, a sickly brown.
The un-raked leaves crumple
like first drafts tossed in a waste basket.
I sit on the porch steps and watch a spider
pull one long strand of silk from
gutter to rainspout.
The soil in the field sleeps,
wanting warmth for the coming winter.

The trees are but half bare. Beside
the golden sycamore in my neighbor’s yard
stands a red maple. Its’ scarlet leaves
diminish the frail gold.
The sycamore is Diaghilev.
The maple is Nijinsky.
One says to the other: “Astonish me.”

*

Dust and baseball

I am eating a chicken burrito in Sonora when two
outfielders from the Mexican Baseball League stop
in for a beer.

I ask them to autograph the glove I’ve carried with me
since childhood. It’s a Rawlings,
soiled, oiled, and blackened
by the plays of a thousand games.

The fields of Sonora are dry as a prisoner’s throat.
The buses from West Texas
roll past the supermercado
and the dinner plate of the moon.

The bus depot/luncheonette is open
all night for passengers, police, and traffickers.
It is the only place I ever saw a man kick a dog.

The two great institutions of Sonora are dust and baseball.

Paul, my best friend growing up, came to Mexico to play ball.
The Diablos Rojos signed him.
They called him Kid. He played catcher.
One day, in mirage inducing heat, a girl named Rosa came to see him play.
They had met at a bar somewhere in town.
He didn’t play well that day. He never played well again.

He and Rosa got married.
She took him to Guadalajara to work for her father.
He was a businessman.
He ran one brothel and seven funeral parlors.

A year later, his head was found in a ditch.
In his catcher’s mitt.

*

Richard Bloom has published in various magazines, including Seneca Review, New York Quarterly, Barnwood International, and Eunoia Review. He has attended Breadloaf, and studied poetry writing with several accomplished poets at the 92nd Street Y. He worked in advertising for many years. Currently, he is a substitute teacher in the NYC public schools.

Across the Street by Jason Fisk

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Across the Street

We live in the suburbs
and we have a Ring Doorbell
and we have a tiny dog
and there are coyotes
that live in the woods
across the street

I let the dog out
every night before bed
and watch her sniff
the air for dangerous news
blowing from
our coyote neighbors
across the street

I keep an aluminum baseball bat
by the front door
just in case the coyotes
decide to attack her
or try to lure her
back across the street

My imagination has
played out a scenario
where they surround her
and I come thundering
out of the house swinging
the bat left and right
taking out one coyote after another
knocking them here and there
sending them yelping back
to the woods
across the street

I think about the rush
I would get from
posting the Ring-Doorbell video
on Facebook

Every like a micro dose
of adrenaline

*

Jason Fisk lives and writes in the suburbs of Chicago. He has worked in a psychiatric unit, labored in a cabinet factory, and mixed cement for a bricklayer. He was born in Ohio, raised in Minnesota, and has spent the last 25 years in the Chicago area. www.jasonfisk.com