At the Pole Vault Pits

I think of it as a twang, an aerial snapped
back and forth like a crazed metronome.
But it’s more like the jolt of a one-car crash
as if you were barreling down a side street
braced for the whine of a metallic pirouette.
It’s a moment caged by absolution, pole-vaulter,
your moment with the wind, your moment to hit
the gas and run at the bar, fiberglass pole bending
until the strain explodes under your feet,
your eyesight becoming blued and broken
and all the sands and hesitations you’ve tracked
onto the runway are scraped up with your belief in gravity.

A ramp bottom catches the pole
and I miss the shock to your hands,
the loud thunk of sudden stoppage.
The pole doesn’t quiver or catapult,
doesn’t wobble or ring; it simply pulls you,
and then falls away from your trailing hand,
softly rat-a-tat-tatting on the ground.
The just-for-you creak of bending fiberglass
seems yards back, a part of a past life
where you were separate from the sky.
You sense a new height added to your name,
but all you really know is the air rushing past you.

We were silent on the walk to my apartment. It was a full-mooned night in the upper twenties, the type to which every Michigan undergrad becomes inured. Filthy snow piles surrounded us on the lamppost-lit sidewalks. As soon as we turned onto Washington Street the wind shifted from our backs to our faces; Shelagh’s paper rustled in her hands, flapping loudly like a miniature fan.

In my apartment I found myself explaining – again – why the living room floor was strewn with football cassettes. Shelagh nodded. Everything made sense to her. “You really do have a passion for what you do,” she said, removing her boots at the door.

She picked up 10/12/96, Michigan State 42, Illinois 14. “That was a breakout game for Derrick Mason,” I said, removing my boots.

“Is he one of your favorite players?” she asked, sitting on the beat-up yellow upholstered couch, placing the cassette on her lap.

“You could say that,” I said. I went into my bedroom to retrieve my Gatsby paper, expecting Shelagh would remain on the couch. But she followed me. “Holy shit, you have more tapes in here!” she exclaimed. She kneeled to the floor and scooped up two of them. Eyeing me coyly, she said, “They’re such beautiful cassettes,” playfully sliding one along her tanned cheek, still sanguine from the cold. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful cassettes before.”

“Very funny,” I muttered, handing her my paper.

She sat at my computer, from which I’d recently sent out my Guide newsletter. “So this is where it all happens, right?” she asked. “This is where you write your football books?”

“Yup,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, rolling up the sleeves of her pink button-down shirt. “Then this is where I want to read. Maybe I can catch some of your passion.” She flattened my Gatsby paper on the desk and began reading.

Here’s an excerpt:

Nick Carraway wants to play Matthew to Gatsby’s Christ, penning a hagiographic version of another man’s life story. But Nick is no ordinary Matthew; he is a Matthew bent on asserting the accuracy of his Gatsby-Christ gospel, all the while insulting the accounts of Mark, Luke, and John. Not five pages go by, it seems, without Nick introducing documents – train-schedules on which he records party guests, Gatsby’s boyhood notebooks, Gatsby’s medals from the war – to persuade readers that Nick’s version of Gatsby’s life and death is the only verifiable one. All other accounts, proclaims Nick, “were a nightmare – grotesque, circumstantial, eager and untrue” (171).
In short, Nick seems paranoid about alternative versions of a history to which he’s hardly an objective observer. He becomes a spin doctor of Gatsby’s legacy. Witness his erasure of an obscene word scrawled on the “white steps” outside Gatsby’s house (188). (Incidentally, Professor Dalrymple: I believe Nick’s erasure scene is the literary ancestor of Holden’s attempt to erase expletives from the walls of Phoebe’s school in Catcher in the Rye. And I must say: The action of erasing an obscenity seems more plausible coming from a wide-eyed youth like Holden than it does from Nick – unless Mr. Carraway is not as world-weary as he’d have us believe he is by the book’s end. And Nick wants us to believe he’s weary: For he goes out of his way, twice, in this novel, to announce that he’s 30 years old (143, 186), as if desperately trying to impose his numerical maturity on the reader.)

As Shelagh read I stared shamelessly at her, catching the profile of her breasts as she inked remarks in my margins. Soon she caught me peeking. “Are you reading my paper?” she smiled, before turning back to my essay.

I retreated into the world of Shelagh’s paper, with its page numbers on the lower left and its solemn Palatino font. She compared the language and imagery of a Winesburg story called “Hands” to that of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives. I was about halfway done reading when she said, “Okay, are we ready to talk about these?”

“I never would’ve thought to connect “Hands” and Three Lives,” I said.

“You’re too kind,” she said. “I searched for a connection because we had to write a paper. But your essay seems totally…unforced. It’s amazing. It’s better than Dalrymple’s lecture. I feel like my essay scooped the ocean floor and found a few flounders. Whereas yours – is about the wetness of the ocean. Does that make sense?”

“Don’t give me too much credit,” I said. “My mom’s an English teacher. I’ve read Gatsby a dozen times.”

“I’d do a lot to have your brains.”

“I’d do a lot if you wanted the rest of me,” I said.

Silence.

“Where’s your bathroom?” she asked.

She left. I rolled onto my back and drifted into a fantasy of Shelagh returning naked and joining me on the bed. I fancied what life must have been like for her ex. I wondered how any man could dump her.

“What are you thinking about?” said Shelagh. She sat Indian style on the bed beside me, her odorless thick black socks inches from my nose. Then she lay on her side so that she faced me, our heads on the same plane. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” she whispered. Her cola-colored eyes floated within their whites like brown buoys on a milky surface. I stroked her light brown hair with my trembling fingertips. “Can I tell you something?” she whispered. “I don’t want to go back to my room tonight,” she said.

I leaned closer to her. Her mouth greeted mine with closed lips. I sensed her hesitation and though it hurt me, I was too elated about kissing her again to mourn the relative dispassion of the clench. This was the second kiss of my life and for all its shortcomings it still felt like the pleasurable culmination of a thousand once-buried wishes.

My right hand moved from her hair to her shoulder. Shelagh grabbed it there. “Would it be all right,” she whispered, “if we just shut the lights and talked?”

I nodded. She found the light switch and returned to my bed. Mellow rays of lamppost light shone through my blind-less window. We kissed again; or I should say: she let me kiss her. My tongue treaded within her inert mouth. Her tongue did not move in sync with mine, so much as it met and supported, provided assurance through mere presence. Her hands were on my back now, over my sweater. We continued to kiss, she half-heartedly, I with about six hearts.

To this day I don’t know why what happened next, happened next. It was as if someone – not me – flipped an off-on switch inside Shelagh. In two deft motions she unzipped my jeans and shoved down my boxers. Her robotic alacrity shocked me – not so much her possession of quick moves but her rapid decision to abandon her resistance. In turn I reached for her sweats, hoping to seem smooth and certain. In hooking her waistband I inadvertently snared her panties but she didn’t stop me. Next we removed each other’s tops and she was on me – and I was in her: without a word about contraception. With intense forearm pressure she squeezed my head against her collarbone. I sought kissing her but she wouldn’t lower her mouth; I sought sucking her nipples but she held me firm to her neckline. Of course, it wasn’t difficult subordinating these niggling concerns to everything else racing through my mind: how the inside of her felt like a warm bath within an endless glove; how her ass cheeks were almost too muscular to grip; how I was having sex – a hallowed act of matchless significance, according to everyone and everything – yet my mind and body, for all they did feel, had yet to feel wholly new or transformed; and how I was, in point of fact, fucking, though my mind was too preoccupied processing the moment to surrender to libidinal pleasure. Throughout – for all thirty or so seconds – I was unable to lose myself in ecstasy, for fear Shelagh would reverse her off-on switch and dismount. I felt like I might get caught trespassing. All this while I was cozy and erect inside her.

I gasped – giving vent to primal spasms, the unexpected pleasure of bursting into a warm body, rather than my hand. It surpassed the agonizing release of standing ejaculation. For here was flesh to clasp during those long, wrenching shrieks, a heated vessel absorbing my groans and shocks. I loved Shelagh more than anything at that moment. She was there for me as my body erupted and emptied and fell weak with joy and relief, surrender and gratitude.

And then it was over. I had slept with someone. And I could not believe I had slept with anyone, let alone Shelagh. And all because of – my note? My essay? Whatever had flipped her off-on switch, I had no idea. I was flabbergasted and confused: so women could fuck without kissing – what did that mean for my father’s pronouncement about sex as a sacred female act?
In the aftermath Shelagh seemed disturbed – I tried kissing her and she kept her lips closed. And I felt no spark from her lips – it seemed as if she’d gone from half-hearted to vacant.

I grabbed her hand and kissed it several times. I guided her palm to my muscle-less chest, her fingertips pulsing life through my nipples. I pressed her hand against my sternum, hoping to squeeze the neutrality from her clinical fingers, because her indifferent hand was better than no hand at all, and because I wasn’t certain when, or whether, she – or another woman – would touch my chest again. She said: “Ari, I’ll keep my hand there, but I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about my ability to commit. And I don’t want you to wind up hating me if I don’t stop to talk to you in class or I can’t be with you again.”

“Just please keep your hand there and don’t worry about the rest,” I whispered.

“I think you’re getting attached,” she said.

“I’m not. And if I am, it’s my problem. You’ve given me the disclaimers.”

“Fine,” she said. She curled onto her side and pressed her head into the crook of my left arm. We lay naked and silent for several minutes. Finally, I spoke up. “What are you thinking about?” I asked.

“I’m thinking, where’s your blanket?” she said. A thin beam of lamppost light cut through the celery green of her lower back’s tattoo. My blanket was wedged between me and the wall. With a series of graceless kicks and shakes I spread it over both of us. “How many women have you slept with?” she asked.

“None,” I admitted. Honesty had gotten me this far – and I was still too stunned about what had taken place to dissemble.

“But I can tell you’ve been hurt,” she said.

“How can you tell?”

“You have some of my symptoms. I’ve never seen a guy who does what you do.”

“What do you mean?”

“You bury yourself in activity and you don’t even realize it. Your whole lifestyle is a display of self-medication.”

“Do other guys hold your hand to their chest?”

“That’s unusual too. But I don’t know, actually. You seem to think I’m so experienced. Nick – that’s my ex – is the only person I’ve slept with.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” she asked.

I considered saying the following: “I’m thinking about whether you’ll ever kiss me again.” Or:

“I’m thinking I wish you were here every night.”

Instead of saying those things I said: “I’m wondering if – as my life goes on – I’ll just look at each sexual chance like a poor family treats a meal at a restaurant. You know, that it’s special, just because you’re not cooking it yourself, and you don’t know when it might happen again.”

“I don’t know, Ari. I think if you spent less time on football and more time talking to freshmen women, you’d do pretty well.”  I wanted to debate that point but opted for silence, rather than risk saying something that might make her remove her hand from my chest.

When I woke the next morning she was gone. And so was my virginity


Ilan Mochari's debut novel, Zinsky the Obscure (Fomite Press), is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. Kirkus Reviews calls it: "A powerful debut with Dickensian touches in its heartbreaking and occasionally humorous chronicle of the life of a modern young man." Ilan's short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Keyhole, Stymie, Ruthie's Club, and Oysters & Chocolate. Another story was a finalist in a Glimmer Train competition. He has a B.A. in English from Yale University. He used it to wait tables for nine years in the Boston area. For more info, please visit zinskytheobscure.com and ilanmochari.com.

The Soccer Fanatic's Wife


Ay, ay, ay, how the cry of G-O-A-L is the sostenuto, voz,
breath, Shankar raga of my marriage. Do I dare say
couple without the ring of Robinho, Ronaldo, Rex
Diego Maradona, Didier Drogba, Franck Ribéry? Now
every Beckham tattoo is L.A. as Dodger blue, KTTV,
Fosters Freeze, Monroe's star. Oh Barça––how could you
give up the Cup––& usted también Real Madrid––cup out?
How do you say, cómo se dice? Gracias ESPN, Fox Deportes:
I sweep, swiffer, vacuum, dust, cook, write, launder,
jive, console as the español left- and right-brains my IQ.
Kisses for raindrops on thighs, sighs for fouls that trip
lickety-split across the screen. Elims, Copas, playoffs. O
Manchester, united we watch. O Red Bulls when I give in.
No soccer, no foot, no fútbol without élan & Sturm.
O Zidane, Zizou, what happened to you? I miss your tall
prestissimo cuerpo, your cante jondo Berber eyes, slick
quicksilvering on a field like a bath bead, your brilliant hadj-
rolling over Europe. O danseur noble, Marco framed you, I
say, insulting your mother, your sister. What chutzpah
to head-butt the grand finale of your hallowed gig.
Under the hazy moon of the 110 south to the 91, #23 is off,
vroom, across Home Depot field: one-two-one-two-three-
wham––Becks threads a pass: G-o-l-a-z-o for Landon D,
x-tasy for Coach Arena. Galaxy 3, Timbers 1. I love tactic.
"Yes!" Tonight I'll dream of drab English grub,
zesty underwear, & wake to the cry of a far-off vuvuzela.

-For Natalie


It took some effort but I shook Rusty awake and we had a couple of drinks before we headed out. The night was cold and the wind and snow stung, but we had bellies full of booze and money for some gas. The road was clear and Missouri seemed close enough to touch. We had a day of easy driving to go. Maybe three or four if we had a drink along the way.


 
Jared Yates Sexton is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University and serves as Managing Editor at the literary magazine BULL. His work has appeared in publications around the world and has been nominated for a pair of Pushcarts, The Million Writer's Award, and was a finalist for The New American Fiction Prize. His first collection of stories, An End To All Things, is now available from Atticus Books.

My body houses two distinct people -- a lean, lycra-wrapped runner and the church lady, upholstered in pastels with a dinner roll-soft undulating exterior.  She’s a beast, the church lady. She doesn’t think much of running or runners, huffing around in their undershorts and their watches. Maybe if she cleaned the house properly, she wouldn’t have so much energy, the church lady thinks, and she sets her lips in a thin line and gets after a steaming pot of boiled potatoes. Thwump thwump thwump goes her doughy upper arm. If she had her druthers, this body would fill out a housedress with pillowy bulk and relax when it got the chance, instead of all this ignorant tearing around.

Through a regimen of long runs, plyos, intervals, planks and weights, the runner has suppressed the church lady, so observers see the defined calves and sinewy arms of an athlete.  It’s not easy -- the runner has to work for a middle-of-the-pack finish in a race. The kind of training she does would produce far greater results were she not sharing this earthly frame with the Queen of the Casserole. Down but not out, the church lady asserts herself during periods of injury or nasty winter weather, and within a week my body acquires a certain scalloped potato lumpiness.

The church lady is nothing if not patient. For thirty years, she has put up with this 800 repeat nonsense. Fifteen miles -- ridiculous!  But by jingo, her time has come -- it’s called middle age. Now, on the last step of a long run, the church lady heaves a sigh of relief and starts scrubbing the muscle memory clean so that next time the runner goes out for a long run, huh, it’s as if she’s never run a step. As the runner pushes through the last quarter on the track imagining it will be easier next time, that she’ll be able to do more, faster, the church lady says I don’t think so, with hands on chair-ready hips.

From appearances, the runner still manages the house. But sometimes when she struggles through what should be an easy six miles, she hears a thwump thwump thwump and looks down to see the church lady’s knees, soft and plump like dumplings. The church lady is gaining ground -- repeats are fewer, times are slower, shorts are longer.  She is pleased, and the tiniest bit self-righteous, and when no one is looking, she takes a victory lap around the kitchen, finger raised, eyes on fire, housedress flapping, and chest bumps the Frigidaire.

London, August 2012:
Mark Staniforth is a writer and sports journalist from North Yorkshire, England. He has reported on five Olympic Games. Fryupdale, his e-book of short stories, is available via Smashwords.

The following essay by Sydney Lea is excerpted from the book GROWING OLD IN POETRY: TWO POETS, TWO LIVES, which is a reflection by two 70-year-old poets laureate on how they came to the art they practice. In April 2013, Autumn House Press will issue the collection in e-book format.

No matter the self-contempt such a feeling engenders, my love of sports abides– if love is the accurate word– though at 70, in most cases I am perforce a spectator, one soul among the millions of other fans out there. Still, to witness or even to think of athletic competition means for me the electrification of some deep and inscrutable nerve. One cause of this enduring spark must surely be a certain now-ancient headline. I’ll never forget it:

Lea and Harmar Star In Upset of Hotchkiss.

The banner ran in the local newspaper after our ragtag club team beat the prep school with the longstanding hockey tradition. None of us had expected other than a humbling defeat. If I had to count up ten “peak” experiences in my life, at least my younger life, that game, and the way I played it, would make the list, whatever such a fact may imply about my character.

Over the years, to repeat an abiding motif, I have perhaps too often inclined to see myself as a merely okay sort of person, not just as athlete but also as scholar, father, husband, poet, what have you? In my school days, I was proficient with languages and with words in general; indeed, I was a high-end student in all the humanities; but as soon as someone introduced abstract scientific concepts or even plain numbers into the conversation, my game was over. Thus, while I always made my school’s honor roll, I never quite reached high honors.

Now I am poet laureate of Vermont, which has been a great treat: I’ve roamed my little state, library to library, reading and discoursing, and inevitably met up with intriguing people.

A few months back, for instance, in a postage stamp town, a farmer walked over after my presentation and showed me a book: Mountain Interval, by Robert Frost. He asked if I knew it, and I truthfully said indeed I knew its poems well.

“How many of them can you say?” he asked.

I told him I could probably do two or three entire.

“I can do ‘em all,” he answered.

I quizzed him, not asking for recitations of famous entries like “The Road Not Taken” but ones like “Pea Brush” or “An Encounter.”

He obviously had the entire volume by heart.

That sort of experience has made my honorific position a joy. And yet sometimes at night I hear a voice (is it my mother’s or my own, or are those one and the same?): “Poet Laureate of Vermont? What about the U.S.?”

Meandering seems almost a hobby, and I have wandered from that hockey game, in which I played right defense, Billy Harmar left. I was a good player, maybe more than merely good; Billy, on the other hand, a genuine star, would go on to play professionally in the Eastern Hockey League before deciding to take his life in other directions.  Who knows how far up he might have gone from there if he’d chosen? He was brilliant.

For that one night, however, I was brilliant too, and I felt it. I will always have that game to refer to, even if I’ve likely never again felt the rush of fulfillment to quite the same degree, at least certainly not on an athletic stage.

To be sure, I’ve known periods of writing that, whatever others may think about the results, have felt somewhat akin. In those spans, I have come as close to believing in inspiration as I ever will: my fingers move on the keyboard as though they were being guided by something outside myself; my “moves,” to revert to sporting terms, appear to be given to me.

On the evening when Billy and I starred against that daunting team of visitors, everything I did also seemed determined by a power beyond me, and every move went right. I recall, for example, making a rush on goal from the blue line, then sweeping the puck behind me to Billy, who slapped a hard shot at the cage. In the same instant, I saw the Hotchkiss goalie in position to catch the puck, so I held my stick in its path and ticked it just enough to send it over his glove hand.

Billy had a stunningly fast shot. I’m persuaded I couldn’t have replicated that deflection once in ten further tries.

But what I remember most is a certain face-off. I simply knew that the puck, exactly at the moment the ref dropped it, would fly my way belt-high. I held my gauntleted right hand, which I’d normally have kept on the stick, right at the proper level to snare that puck and in the same second drop it and pass it cross-ice to a teammate, who led a scoring charge up to the other goal.

Between periods, our own first-rate goalie, Tom Lewis –now an eminent scholar and my dear friend of more than sixty years, the two of us having gone to nursery school together– said, “It must have been premonition, the way you reached for that puck.”

It was just that, but where the foreknowledge came from will forever be a mystery.

The next year I got admitted to Yale, where, I was assured, all the students would be geniuses, to which I can tersely respond by mentioning a name: George W. Bush. Be that as it may, there were some very bright young men on the New Haven campus. There were also some exceptionally good hockey players.

I knew I’d never be the best student in my class, any more than I’d be the best player on the hockey team. And so, utterly uncertain as to who the hell the real Lea was, I must have concluded that I’d be the best hard-drinking, partying, outrageous good student and good hockey player anyone knew.

I didn’t know it at seventeen, but I was already on my way to a years-long, dazing battle with substance abuse, mostly alcohol. I saw no problem even when, in due course, the addictive demons taking over, my grades turned from highly respectable to B and lower. Eventually, it seems almost unnecessary to add, I quit the hockey squad.

I never, however, entirely quit my enthusiasm for sports. When I got to grad school, and soon enough started my college teaching career I turned myself into a fine handball player, though there remained people, like the greatly decent and greatly skilled Dartmouth intramural coach Will Volz, to whom I remained an agonizing touch inferior.

Nothing new about that. It was thus almost a relief when, in 1975, a torn meniscus –treatment for which was far dicier and debilitating than it is in our era of arthroscopic surgery– got in the way, and I had to quit that competition too.

From childhood, of course, I’d had other sporting instincts, ones of a different stripe. I loved to train and hunt behind bird dogs; I loved to fly fish; I loved hiking and canoeing. These have, in fact, remained lifelong passions, to which I have added kayaking, something, as I mentioned earlier, that I’ve occasionally practiced competitively in the last half decade. All these pursuits keep me in pretty fair shape, especially since I got into recovery from addiction some considerable time back. So far as team sports go, though, I am now not unlike many more sedentary friends: I don’t watch TV news, sitcoms, or anything else. But I do watch sports.

Perhaps oddly, I do not follow the favorite sport of my youth: this may simply be any old geezer’s rumination, but it doesn’t seem to me that the teamwork, especially the passing, is what it was in the era of Maurice Richard, Jean Beliveau, Red Kelly and Doug Harvey. Modern players seem simply to dump the puck into the offensive zone and then go racing after it. And the glorification of fights –though I concede I had my share of them in my playing days– now strikes me as anything but glorious.

If I’m at home, however, rarely do I miss either a Celtics or Red Sox game, no matter I was anything but adept at either of those games. I spectate alone for the most part, and would be, in all candor, a tad embarrassed to have other grown men and women regard the passion of my rooting.

Yes, I am a gung-ho fan, even if I know how silly it is to heroize athletes of any stripe, let alone the pros, whose ranks include so many undesirables: narcissists at best, referring to themselves in the third person, others wife-beaters, felons, and cheats, imagining themselves immune from the societal and characterological strictures that the rest of us must accept. If there are heroic figures in sports –I think of Jackie Robinson, say, or Stan Musial or Bill Russell– I fear they are the exceptions.

Of course, it’s not merely the athletes who so often disgrace themselves.  As I write this, football’s New Orleans Saints are under scrutiny for something called Bountygate, their former defensive coach having offered pay to players who injured other teams’ stars. It revolts me to know that there are those who excuse this pig’s incentives, as if the potential ruin of an opponent’s career, or the permanent alteration of his health, were just –as they say– “a part of the game.”

Football, I admit, is my least favorite spectator of the major sports.  And my attitude toward most football coaches I have observed ranges from contempt to mere neutrality. To me it is telling that the NFL’s Super Bowl trophy is named for someone who famously claimed that “winning isn’t the most important thing; it’s the only thing.” To some, these are words of an inspiring figure; to me they are those of a moral idiot.  Wouldn’t the world be well served by abandoning such primitive counsel?

And yet.

And yet here is a challenging poem by James Wright called “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio”:

      In the Shreve High football stadium,
      I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
      And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
      And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
      Dreaming of heroes.

      All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
      Their women cluck like starved pullets,
      Dying for love.

      Therefore,
      Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
      At the beginning of October,
      And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.
   
A quick and careless reading of that poem would go something like this: the world of Martin’s Ferry is arid, oppressive, sexually deprived, and as a result –note that the word therefore is the only one with its own line– the community’s blighted adults make heroes of their athletic male children, who, we know, will succeed them in their own ruined domain.

But where is the speaker of this poem, the poet? The very first line puts him “In the Shreve High football stadium.” He is a participant! His poem knows there is something very wrong in what he beholds, and yet what he beholds must also captivate him to some degree. And notice that the spectacle he witnesses is not merely terrible and violent but is also “suicidally beautiful.” Those two words are the profound imaginative triumph of Wright’s work here. They show how, in lyric (as in life, or at least my own), disparate and even contradictory impulses can exist simultaneously.

Perhaps I am simply clutching at justification for my TV-watching habits, seeking comfort in Whitman’s famous “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” But I’m not large, and I know it. I suspect in plain truth that I willingly suspend my adult skepticism and even my ethical inquietude when I watch a great game of basketball or baseball that involves a Boston team. I see “my” players as heroes malgré moi. In fact I can even, if grudgingly, admire the prowess of players from opposing teams.

Even in my moment of hockey “greatness,’’ I understand, I could never have dreamed of doing the things that I see on the screen; but to observe these extraordinary feats of physical skill and intelligence is still to recall that ancient, overwhelming, lit-from-within enthusiasm of the Hotchkiss game, a feeling that remains a sort of iconic moment in my soul.

But I need to finish this now. My Celtics –with their heroic veteran corps of Jason Terry, Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, along with the dazzling youngster Rajon Rondo– are taking on the dread Lakers in a matter of minutes.

I read poetry because I want to be transported into another world; I want to be told a story; I want to escape; I want to be blown away; or I want to float in the continuous suspension of language. These caveats are all present along with four elements that arrest you when you pick up Kelli Allen’s book Otherwise, Soft White Ash. The cover art makes you look closer.  A large rabbit rides a patchwork wolf through a field of trash. The entire cover is monochromatic except for the trash, which is rendered in color.  Upon closer inspection a local reader will realize that the trash is also local—Imo’s pizza carton, Budweiser case, and something hidden in the grass I will not reveal. Upon opening the book, you realize there is more here than a compilation of previously published works or a specially ordered Table of Contents. The first thing you think of is that this book has been designed.  This author or publisher and artist took it upon themselves to actually offer a book design that supports the written work.  Otherwise is illustrated!

Danielle Spradley’s folkloric art, Saddled, is found on the cover and throughout the book. There is a blend of prose and poetry that adds a breathing quality to this book allowing us to take in sumptuous gasps of air between parts.  The cover art, illustration, and design elements, and uncommon mix of story and poetry work together to hold our attentions.

It is a curious process to search for thesis maps in the design and placement of parts in a book, but deciphering the language logic alone, could not lead us safely down the paths toward the alternate worlds alluded to in Kelli Allen’s writing. This book of prose, verse, and illustration offers such strong visual and heartfelt elements that the map we need to guide us along the road is readily available with clues throughout. These clues explain the crux of why we should consider re-imagining our worlds from childhood and beyond.

In “Orphaned Near the Cave,” there’s an egg, a litany of shame, green earrings, a grandfather telling Baba Yaga tales and building a special wall.  There’s a little girl, Celia, fathoming her own place in a world where fairy tales mix with reality and a there’s a disapproving dancing mother carrying cranberries in a “squat sequined bag.” Celia holds her mother’s head in her lap as she attempts to bleed to death and recover from yet “another rehearsal for ending her life.” And there’s more: elephants and dragonflies and Ivan, a lost heirloom watch, and fishing photos—“This boy, an urchin operating purely from his own conception of joy, would grab the grey bucket, take a fish lung, place it on the ground, and leap onto it quickly, a stomp creating a loud pop which I could feel in my throat as I watched from a table near the shore, using the camera to see closer, to still and finalize each moment.” (11) Celia grows up and comes to terms with her own story:             

I know where the cave’s mouth gapes, and how the secret dens tucked high and black against rock must invent their stories . . . I have learned little from my mother. If there is no test for truth, what else can we do but walk . . .and wait to feed whatever wild animals wait for us near the wood’s edge? (11-12)

There are four sections in Kelli’s book. An Introduction by Kerry Cohen and Kelli’s coming-of-age story, “Orphaned at the Cave,” lead us into the rich language world in the poetry sections “One: Otherwise Soft White Ash” and  “II: Making the Mouth” where we continue our journey toward “III: Notes to Elijah” and the end, another prose section, “Four: One Final Wing.” The end where we stand with the grandfather’s warning from the opening story “that where we choose to let the story end is dependent upon faith and, sometimes, intention.”

In “Otherwise, Soft White Ash, ” the lead poem in the first part, the mother and her bag appear again, this time “like an overripe avocado.”(18) In “Noon, Like Whiplash,” “There is no room for apology/at any moment in the scene, neither/when it unfurled as quick thin tentacles/or now, when recollection feels viscous/ and tastes of paint left to dry on a lid.”(21) Later in the same poem, “The sheets on her bed were beautiful,/and watching her blood deploy itself/over the quiet sheen of the cotton/was a betrayal of sorts. I imagined/she would wake at any moment; her mouth/opening in an impossible “O,” and hordes/of butterflies would emerge and become her hair.” (23)

The last poem in this section is divided into six roman numbered parts and two offer meta-poetry about verse.  In fact, in parts II and III of  “Amputated Landscape, Closer to Getting There,” Allen writes: “Verse contains everything./ A line can hold or ignore/any number of ideas, images,/ expressions, admonishments,/desires, and rarely,/only if we look closely/enough, eyes ready to dart/back away, truths. I try/ to strap my lines/ into obedience just long enough/ to hold them to the page—” (30) and then in part III: “A verse is a solid place/for a man’s bathrobe/to fall open in the hallway”(31).  In this same poem Allen lures us with language: “That is the universe/ where I am allowed/ to inhabit glass-walled bars/where the waitresses/ are all peeled and wicked,/ the machinery of the insect legs/both repulsive and seductive.” (29)

The mother appears in every poem in Part One; however, we do not see her in “II: Making the Mouth,” until page 61 (although she may be implied earlier) with butterflies in a soybean field in “Every Story Began on a Wing.” In the eighteen poems before this, we can imagine and dream with nature and beasts and there is promise. After this, hope continues and even baseball appears definitively in “Remembering Birds” on page 75. All of the middle poems wander in and out of one of Ms. Allen’s favorite themes, myth.

The final poems, “Part III Notes for Elijah” are dedicated to Kelli Allen’s son, according to Kerry Cohen in the Introduction. They are, in essence, messages left to him for the future from the author who is now a mother. Otherwise ends like it begins with a prose piece, “Words for Open,” and here myth and emotion combine to offer our transport.       

There was no embroidery on the fabric’s surface and when you lifted the lowest arch of my back and slid the pillow’s roundness beneath me, it was cool and silken, so much that I lost any awareness of its shape apart from my own. (105)

It is difficult to advise whether one should read this before bed as I did for several nights over and over, because the contents can send you into a dreamland from which it may be difficult to re-emerge.  If it were not for the accompaniment of the wolf and hare and egg drawings, I think I would not have had the courage to finish, and it would have been my loss. Kelli Allen’s Otherwise, Soft White Ash transports and transforms us with wings we have not considered.

-MM Anderson
January 9, 2013



Run For the Hills

They did not tell me I would boil from the inside out.
They did not tell me that I would become unbearably bored
or that I’d never make any money,
and that it would become difficult to move.

They did not tell me medication would be required,
I would crave the under side of the underdog,
or that love would be difficult.
They did not tell me my eyesight would give out.

They did not tell me that I wouldn’t be able to sleep
or that Earth would die, slowly, while I watched.
They did not tell me about the alcohol or the drugs
or that corn could kill ya.

They did not tell me I would wait constantly for the phone to ring,
and then that it would ring incessantly.
I was told I’d be alone in the end, but I did not listen.

MM Anderson
St. Louis, MO
2013

MM Anderson:
Grew up in Hawaii and North Dakota.
Went to school in Indiana and Texas.
Got married.
Teaching Native American Studies, Poetry, and Fiction.
Likes to cook.

Garion passes to Dave who passes to Steve who kicks it straight to Shaz who does a back heel which doesn’t work at all and leaves the ball bobbling off to a bit of the park where there isn’t anyone. Under pressure from Denner, Posh Geordie and The Mixer, Shaz walks off to collect the ball and hoofs it up towards where it is beautifully trapped by Dave’s instep. Dave —who everyone agrees is probably the best player—spins on his heels to send a delicate ball across to Steve who does nothing with it because he’s in the middle of texting. Steve looks up confused as Dave says three four-letter swear words, one after the other. The Mixer and Shaz tell Dave to: “calm down,” to “chill out,” and to “stop taking it all so serious like always.” Dave shrugs and goes to collect the ball himself. The ball is yellow and brand new. Dave bought the ball himself that morning specifically for the football. Posh Geordie says he thinks it might rain soon. The Mixer looks at the sky and agrees. Garion realises that if Dave passes to him right now he is in actual acres of space. In goal, Disaster-Waiting-to-Happen (DWTH) is stretching his arms up trying to reach the crossbar. Shaz, Posh Geordie, Denner and the Mixer are now all looking up at the sky and flicking bits of grass into the wind to try and establish which direction the clouds are arriving from. Garion overhears one of them say: “I aint getting wet I’ve got a date later.” The Mixer says it doesn’t bother him getting wet because he is wearing shorts. Garion realises that he is now, if anything, in even more space, because of the way everyone has bunched up to talk about weather. DWTH has stopped stretching for the crossbar and is now just leaning against the post chewing gum. Shaz walks over to him to ask for gum. They talk about something Garion can’t catch because he is in just too much space. It doesn’t look like they’re talking about weather because they are both laughing hard and no one laughs like that over weather. Steve is still texting. Dave has collected the ball and is way over to the left of the goal doing keep-e-ups. Denner and Posh Geordie have lit up cigarettes on what would be the edge of the six yard box if this was a proper pitch. The Mixer is doing these exaggerated coughs right next to Denner and Posh Geordie to let them know that he can see they are smoking and does not approve. Denner begins telling The Mixer, Posh Geordie and Steve—who is no longer texting—about the date he has that evening. Garion almost trots over to listen properly but just can’t bear to give up on all that space. The Mixer is still coughing. Garion recalls that The Mixer successfully gave up smoking a year earlier at the age of 26. Dave is still going with the keep-e-ups. From what Garion can overhear Denner is going on a date with a 17-year-old. “It’s alright,” he says, amidst jeers. “She’s 17, she’s legal.” “Barely legal,” says someone, possibly The Mixer: it’s certainly the kind of thing he would say. Denner repeats that she is totally legal. “We could marry with her parent’s consent,” he says. “You’re not going to marry her though are you,” says Steve. Denner says no, he is not going to marry her. It dawns on Garion that it was Denner who said about not getting wet because he’s got a date later. Dave is still doing keep-e-ups. He has a record in the tens of thousands set at a charity keep-e-up-athon when he was still at college. DWTH is watching Shaz do pull-ups on the cross bar. He says over and over: “Do you work out,” in a sort of American accent he puts on from time to time. Shaz is chewing and laughing and pulling all at once. Denner likens the girl he’s got the date later with to, “the one off Harry Potter, circa the Half Blood Prince.” Steve, The Mixer and Posh Geordie all declare this to be “bullshit.” Denner tells them to “fuck off.” He points out that in a few more years they’d all have to be paying to go with an actual teenager. Garion is in a painful amount of space. He begins to wave his arms at Dave who is still going with the keep-e-ups. There is a shout and a thud  and Garion turns to see Shaz lying on his back between the goal posts. DWTH is standing over him laughing hard. Shaz says “Aaaah my back.” Denner, Steve, The Mixer and Posh Geordie all turn round and all laugh. Shaz lies out on the grass groaning. Out to the left Dave has stopped doing keep-e-ups and has the ball in front of him ready to pass. Garion waves from his space. Shaz is still on the floor. Denner, The Mixer, Steve and Posh Geordie are now standing over Shaz and laughing alongside DWTH. Dave spots Garion waving and puts a hand up to acknowledge this. Dave has a great cross on him. Shaz repeats “Aaaah my back,” three more times amidst laughter. DWTH calls him a plonker of the highest grade. Dave floats a ball over to where Garion stands in that inordinate amount of space. Shaz breaks off groaning to accuse DWTH of popping him one in the gonads mid pull-up. DWTH does not say whether or not this is bullshit. Garion realises that Dave’s cross is coming straight to him. Dave is already jogging towards the goal. Shaz is still groaning on the goal line and everyone else is still laughing. Garion can see he is not going to have to move here. All he has to do is lean forward and take the yellow ball on the volley and this is going to go in. DWTH finally spots Garion in the space getting ready to shoot and says: “Hey, hey, fucking goals ahoy.” The goal line ensemble disperses. Garion leans forward to put his laces through Dave’s sublimely weighted ball. DWTH is almost standing on top of Shaz, who is still laid out on the floor, groaning. As his foot hits the ball Garion realises that he is looking directly at where DWTH is standing over Shaz. Garion knows that this means he cannot be looking at the ball. This is fatal. Garion watches DWTH as both their eyes follow the ball way off to the right. The yellow ball rises higher and higher until it disappears into the trees over on that side of the park. Nearly everyone swears. Denner calls Garion a “Cunt” and a “Twat.” Steve and the Mixer chant “Cheerio Garion, where the fuck are you from?” Dave says that was all fucking shocking. DWTH repeats the phrase “Taxi for Garion” six times. Shaz says “Aaaah, my fucking back.” Posh Geordie says “Fuck me, it is going to rain.” Everyone implores Garion to go and fetch the ball pronto. Garion trots away from the space to find the ball. Someone continues singing “Cheerio-Cheerio-Cheerio,” long after everyone else has stopped. Just as Garion enters the trees he hears DWTH shout after him to “think long and hard about what you’ve done.” The trees are pretty thick and close together. There are dense clumps of nettles and brambles and the trees are tightly packed. Garion estimates where the ball might be and pushes through the undergrowth. Garion is really glad he is wearing trousers today with all these nettles around.  Garion is scanning the ground ahead of him looking for the yellow ball. He imagines what a yellow ball would look like in amongst all those nettles and brambles. He sincerely hopes the ball has not popped on a bramble. There is the sound of singing somewhere which Garion figures must be DWTH or Steve or Denner. It should not be hard to spot a yellow ball in green undergrowth. Garion realises that the singing is really high pitched, like a girl’s voice would be. Garion listens hard to the singing as he rounds a tree and finds a little blonde boy standing in front of him. The little blonde boy is kicking a yellow football and singing. The boy does not look at all like he knows Garion is behind him. Garion wonders how he could ever have thought that the little blonde haired boy’s voice belonged to DWTH or Steve or Denner. Sometimes DWTH puts on a silly girls voice that sounds a bit like something from Monty Python. Garion walks towards the boy. On the other side of the boy is a clearing. In the middle of the clearing is a rug. There is a picnic laid out on the rug. There are crisps and sandwiches and apples and mini savoury eggs. The little blonde boy is kicking the yellow ball back towards the rug and the picnic in the clearing. Sitting next to the picnic reading a book is a girl with short blonde hair tied back in a knot. Garion hears her ask the little blonde boy what he has found. “Foosball,” he says. The girl smiles at the boy. She says football firmly and loudly, emphasizing the T. “Foosball,” says the little blonde boy. The girl smiles a second time. The little blonde boy kicks the ball off in the opposite direction and runs after it with busy steps. Garion is stood on the edge of the clearing when the girl notices him. “Hello,” says the girl. Garion reckons she must be 19 or 20 years old. She is wearing open-toed sandals. Garion says hello. He recognises the girl from somewhere. He recalls long blonde hair that flowed down her back and was never tied up. There was a nickname. The girl puts down her book. “Bex,” says Garion. Bex smiles. She nods. “Garion right,” she says. Bex asks Garion how are things, what’s he been up to, where’s he been? Garion explains about playing a bit of football with the lads. He says he lost the ball and came to find it. “Has my son stolen your ball,” says Bex with a smile. Garion watches the little blonde boy kicking the ball across the clearing and chanting: “Foosball, foosball, foosball.” Bex smiles and says something about Ts and Ss being interchangeable this week. She is wearing denim dungarees with a white vest underneath. Garion watches her slim arms stretch out to pick up a mini savoury egg. Bex is the little sister of Chris who Garion knew when he was at college. Garion even spots Chris’s old school bag which Bex has brought along to carry the picnic in. Garion last saw Bex when she was 14, 15 maybe. He works out she must now be 21. She picks up a second mini savoury egg and pops it in whole. “It’s been a while,” says Garion. “It’s been years,” says Bex. Bex glances over her shoulder to where the little blonde boy is still kicking the yellow football back and forth across the clearing. Garion takes a step forward. He asks what she’s been up to, what she did after school – did she go to college? Bex pops a third mini savoury egg in. “I went to college,” she says. “I did music. I played the piano. I was good at the piano.” Garion remembers Bex being good at the piano. He remembers going round to Chris’s house to play video games and her sitting in the other room and just playing and playing and playing. “You were always good at the piano,” says Garion. Bex suddenly drops her head forward and lets her eyes look serious. “I wasn’t just good Garion, I was really good. Strangers would come to my concerts. They would sit with their arms crossed and their eyes half closed. When I finished playing they would applaud. I got on a course in Manchester to do nothing but play piano, at the Royal Northern College of Music. I went up there totally excited; in Manchester there were going to be loads of people who would come and cross their arms and half close their eyes. There would be loads of people to applaud.” Garion takes another step forward. The little blonde boy is sitting on the football, inspecting something in the dirt with his hands. “I was really good at the piano,” repeats Bex. Garion nods. He remembers how he and Chris used to call her Chopsticks to her face. Bex looks off into the trees. She says she got pregnant in her first month in Manchester. She says she didn’t know anything about it. An honest mistake, she says. Before the first year was done she was back home with a blonde haired baby boy. Bex swings round to watch the little blonde boy push a grubby stick in and out of his mouth like a done lollipop. The stick is covered in mud and glistens from where it is being sucked. “Take that dirty stick out of your mouth please,” says Bex. She turns back to Garion: “Just because he’s had his tetanus he thinks he can eat anything. He says it gives him superman powers. He says he can fly and see through walls.” “What do you say?” Asks Garion. Bex looks serious again. Her head is tilted forward and her eyes are low. “I see no reason to doubt him,” she says. “Besides, it’s good to know someone who can fly.” Bex looks back at the little blonde boy, now poking harmlessly at the ground with the stick. “That’s my fresher’s week baby right there,” grins Bex. Garion realises he wants to sit down on the rug. He wants to sit down with Bex and share her picnic. He wants to pass the yellow ball back and forth with the little blonde boy while Bex holds his hand. He wants to go home with them and help out around the house. He wants to get up early and watch cartoons with the little blonde boy so Bex can lie in bed with a cup of tea. He wants to use the money from his job to buy her a proper picnic basket so she doesn’t have to go around with her brother’s old school bag. He wants to drive them all to the beach so the little blonde boy can build in the sand while Bex finishes her book in the sun. He wants to find her a piano so play so that in the evenings he can stand at the kitchen sink washing up, while Bex and the little blonde boy sing songs that they have made up together. He wants very much to hold Bex by the hand and kiss her on the lips when she is half asleep. There is a crunch when Bex picks up an apple and takes a bite. “Oh sorry,” she says, looking up at Garion with a mouth full of apple, “you must want your football back.” She calls the little blonde boy over. He runs slowly kicking the football ahead of him with his shin. “Foosball, foosball, foosball,” he says. Bex holds him by both hands. “No,” she says, “listen, football, there’s a T.” “Foosball,” says the little blonde boy. “No, there’s a T, football.” “Foosball,” says the little blonde boy with a wide smile. For a moment Garion watches Bex say nothing. The little blonde boy begins to laugh. “Foosball, foosball, foosball,” he says. Bex begins to laugh with him. “OK,” she says. “This week it’s a foosball.” She tells the little blonde boy that this man is Garion. She says the ball is Garion’s ball. She asks the boy to please give the ball back to Garion. Slowly the boy picks up the ball in both hands. He holds it close to his chest with his arms stretched right round it. He walks towards Garion and holds the ball out towards him. “Your foosball,” he says. Garion looks at the ball. He looks at the little blonde boy. He looks at Bex on the blanket. “Your foosball,” says the boy, looking confused. “My football’s white,” says Garion. “It must be somewhere else.” The boy grins. Bex smiles. Garion nods. The boy drops the ball and kicks it back across the clearing. Garion turns and trots back through the trees. The insults arrive with the rain, long before he’s clear of the nettles.

 

On a Wednesday in May of 2011, in a game of full-court basketball during my lunch hour, I ruptured my Achilles tendon. 

I was at the top of the key and a shot went up strong side. The shot was long, bounced off the back of the rim, and while several players near the basket jumped for the rebound, no one secured the ball. It was tapped to the corner, and I turned to chase it down. One guy made a final attempt to leap and catch the ball, and when he missed, he landed on the back of my leg with all his weight, anchoring me in place. I hit the floor hard and screamed in pain. 

My friend, Marc McKee, a wonderful poet and a fellow hoops junkie, was also playing, and when I went down, he raced over. He asked, did you hear a pop? It was an important question. Every sports fan knows that when a muscle or tendon tears, it’s always described as a pop, a sensation of something small exploding, whether it’s a knee, shoulder, elbow, or, in this case, an ankle. This is important information. I did not hear a pop. Therefore, in my logic, I was fine. A sprained ankle. A badly sprained ankle. But a sprained ankle nonetheless. 

Still, I knew it was bad because I couldn’t seem to plant my right foot to stand up. I needed help to my feet, and when I was standing, my foot wouldn’t rise when I wanted to walk. Of course, it didn’t: the Achilles was fully ruptured. I didn’t know until much later how the Achilles worked, how it connected the calf muscle to the heel bone, stretching down the back of the lower leg, that when you are lying on your stomach, and someone squeezes your calf muscle, your big toe will twitch. All I knew then was that walking wasn’t going the way I wanted it to. I turned my right foot out at a forty-five degree angle and walked—limping, painful, dragging my leg, but yes, walking with no help—to the bleachers and sat down. 

I didn’t see a doctor for five days.

What did I do during this time? I iced my ankle. I went to work; I traded in my dress shoes for my boots, laced those suckers up as tight as they would get, and walked. I drove to work (remember, this was my right foot). I walked up the stairs—I rarely take the elevator—to my fourth floor office. I gritted my teeth. I was stubborn. And stupid.

Finally, recognizing that I did in fact have health insurance (nope, I don’t even have the excuse of poverty to claim here), I drove myself to the doctor’s office, where an intern who looked maybe twelve examined me for twenty minutes—why so long, I don’t know—before declaring with almost zero confidence “I’m not sure, but I think you ruptured your Achilles.” 

My stomach dropped. A ruptured Achilles, I knew, was serious. Surgery. Weeks on crutches. Months of physical therapy. A long time before I play basketball again. This was one of my very first thoughts. 

Why does basketball matter so much?
This feels like a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad answer. I should tell you that I write to figure out the world. I should tell you I write to communicate. I should tell you I write to shed light on the shadows of our world. I should tell you something pithy about art, and creativity, and being engaged in the world through my work, trying to make sense of the ever-changing and always challenging human condition. 

What I keep coming back to, though, is basketball. How I love to shoot jump shots. How I love to make a pass that gets through three defenders, bouncing once through traffic, into the hands of my teammate—he catches it right at his hip—and with one step, he rises, and lays a soft sweet spinning shot off the glass for an easy bucket (Marc McKee and I, actually, work this like the Clyde and the Pearl). I am not exaggerating when I say that this image, this action, is a beautiful thing. I love basketball because you can see the players. You can see their faces, their arms, their hands, the aggression and frustration and competition and dedication visible with every movement of their bodies. I love it because it’s a team game. I love it because it’s an individual game. I love it because you need five guys to play. I love it because you don’t need anyone to play, not a single soul in the gym, just you and the rock, to work on your dribble, your jumper, to spin and spin and then fadeaway, think to yourself “JORDAN …!!!” in that Marv Albert voice of anticipation before launching a silky jumper that you release just before the buzzer in your head sounds, in that empty gym, the only sound the ball swishing through the net. 

Basketball is not a refuge for me from the world. I don’t think “Man, I need to get away from all this stuff and play ball.” I just think, “I want to play.” It’s a part of my world as normal as breathing. It’s exactly like breathing, actually: I didn’t think about its importance until I can’t, until a cold or a flu (or a ruptured Achilles tendon) comes along. Until I, quite literally, could not stand on my own two feet. 

Recovering from Achilles tendon surgery is a slow process. I had surgery, my leg in a cast for eight weeks, and navigated the stairs on crutches. Then I got a walking boot. Then I got heel lifts to put in my shoes. At physical therapy, I rolled a tennis ball under my foot, heel to toe, in slow circles. I had to do calf raises, pushing my heel off the floor, rising up as high as I could onto my toes … and laughed when for the first two weeks of PT all those signals from my brain to my foot didn’t get me even a millimeter off the floor. There was more. There was the repaired ankle as inelastic as a new rubber band. There was the calf muscle that just won’t get strong again. There were quarter-body squats, then half-body squats, then full-body squats, deep down until my hips were below my knees. There was jumping rope. There was running for the first time—hot damn, did that feel fantastic—and the realization that I heel-strike way too much than is good for my back, hips, and legs going forward into middle-age. Then, finally, in October, there was the first time I dribbled a basketball again, the feeling like seeing an old friend for the first time in years. 

Did I ever think I wouldn’t play again? Honest? Not for a moment. Of course, I’d play again. I just needed to not skip any steps and work my way up to it. It’s a process I love. I love remembering to jump straight up on a shot, to keep my elbow in, to follow through, to keep my eye on the whole rim rather than one spot. I feel satisfaction when I get it right, and I chide myself when I get it wrong. But I do not quit. I don’t even think about quitting. I didn’t need to tell myself that I couldn’t play anymore and that I need to take up golf. I love playing. Why would I stop? 

Why do I write? I love sentences. I love words. I love that it might take me a very long time to write a good sentence, and that I have no problem reading a sentence dozens and dozens of times before I find the clause, or word, or sound, that isn’t correct, and then grab my thesaurus and dictionary, or both, and fish for that one perfect word (which may not, of course, matter all that much; it might show me that the right word changes the clause, and hence the sentence, then the paragraph, then … well, you see where this is going). It’s methodical, sure. But that’s writing. 

I write because the process of narrative—the making and shaping, slicing and dicing—is what I love. All those lovely things that writers much smarter than me have been saying for centuries is also true: art, particularly storytelling is human, and the way we understand ourselves and others is through our stories. 

In his essay “The Crack Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” He’s my literary hero and I’d like to believe I’m smart, so I love this quote. I write for the finished narrative; I don’t write at all with concern for the finished narrative. The idea, that I think I’m driving at here, which is that I both care and don’t care why I write. And like Denis Johnson wrote: you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.



Michael Nye’s debut short story collection is Strategies Against Extinction (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2012). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Crab Orchard Review, New South, and Kenyon Review, among many others. He is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.

There was a time when it all flowed, when his whole body exploded into each stroke and the sound of his racquet smacking the ball shattered the air like a thunderclap. There was a time when guys couldn’t get a shot past him, when he flicked everything back. The hummingbird, they called him, because of the way he hovered around the court, his quick feet barely skimming the ground. He played tennis in a trance then, his brain out of the equation—no agonizing over strategy, whether to go up the middle, down the line, or cross-court; flat or with topspin or slice. It all just flowed, the right shot materializing at the right time.

 
Vicente R. Virayholds an MFA in fiction from the University of San Francisco. His writing has appeared in California Northern, Chelsea Station, Educe, The Greensboro Review, and other places. He lives in San Francisco with his partner Paul. "Terra Firma" is part of a longer story cycle that features Ryan as its main character. The first story in that cycle can be read here.

In my mid-teens, I trained as a boxer with a view toward competing on the Golden Gloves circuit. Then, at age 16, I got a summer job as the third cook on a Norwegian coal freighter bound for Europe.  There was no way for me to anticipate how my boxing skills would make me, an American boy, a hero among adult Scandinavian merchant seamen.  In retrospect, my boxing skills were hereditary, or so I learned well before I started training to fight.

One hot summer day on a drive toward Virginia Beach, I was with my dad when we stopped for a cold drink at an auto repair garage and its accompanying junkyard.  A very large, powerful fat man in dirty coveralls emerged from one of the repair bays to greet my father with a laughing face and a firm black grease-stained handshake.  Dad looked at the transfer of grease to his own hand and laughed.

“This is Tiny,” he said to me.  “You don’t want to shake his hand just yet.”

“This your boy?” Tiny acknowledged.  “How come he is so much better looking than you?”

“Real good looking momma, I guess.”

“Boy, I been knowing your daddy long before he ever thought about your momma.  I think you favor him more than her.  Come on inside and let me treat you all to a cold drink.”

It turned out that Tiny was another Norfolk, Virginia Fairmount Park boy who had gone to school with Dad and then followed him into a machinist apprenticeship at Whaley Engineering at the edge of the old neighborhood.  As other acquaintances arrived at the garage, and the adult camaraderie and joke telling separated me from Dad, Tiny took me aside to tell a few stories of his own.

“You see this big flabby arm?  Your daddy ever tell you about the only time I ever would play knocks with him?" Tiny began.  "I didn’t think so.  We were apprentice boys at Whaley, maybe eighteen years old.  At lunchtime, we’d go out into the steelyard to eat lunch and fool around.  Sometimes we would play knocks.  I hit you on your upper arm, and then you hit me.  We see who quits first.  Well, your daddy didn’t want to play.  Said he might hurt somebody.  Well, that just egged us on.  I was especially after him to hit me first so that I could lay him low with one of my haymakers.  Naw, he said, if you got to play, you can hit me first.  So I wound up this big ham of mine like a baseball pitcher and hit him as hard as I ever hit anybody, and it rocked him off his feet, and I know it left a purple bruise the size of a dessert plate on his left arm.

"So now it’s his turn.  He says that he's going to hit me with a six-inch punch.  Well, the boys laughed at him and made him measure his fist the six inches.  Well, I’m thinking this is a gimme.  Your dad will never go a second round after what I done to him.  So he gets up on his toes, and I brace myself with all the boys standing around, and he hit me right here on the flesh of my arm with a six-inch punch. The punch rocked me.  It stung me.  Then I looked down at my arm.  There, as plain as a dye punch, was the imprint of your daddy’s fist in my flesh, and in the three spaces between the fingers there was lines and drops of blood pinched out.  Nobody could believe what they saw.  I wanted no more knocks with your daddy, and neither did anybody else.  He had the most powerful punch in the world.  We were downright afraid of him.  He ever tell you that story?”

“No sir.”

“I guess he never told you about knocking out the middleweight champion of the world, did he?”

“No sir.”

“Damn, a man’s son ought to know such things.  If your old man is too modest to tell you, I guess it's up to his buddies to do it.  Hell, you probably wouldn’t believe such tales if he told ‘em himself.  Like the knocks story I just told you.  If you wasn’t me or a witness to it, you just couldn’t believe it.

“Your daddy was already over at Norfolk Ship so it was wartime, probably 1942.  He wasn’t even 25 at the time.  Well, Norfolk was a big fight town in those days.  There were fight cards at the Norfolk Arena every weekend and fights over in Portsmouth and in Hampton every week, too.  We knew about five or six gyms where the fighters worked out.  Our guys from the old neighborhood followed the fights.”

“My dad still does,” I said.  “I heard the Ezzard Charles-Jersey Joe Walcott fight on the car radio with him.”

“You ever heard of Tony Zale?”

“No sir.”

“Well, Tony Zale held the middleweight crown for at least six or seven years from the early forties.  He came before Sugar Ray Robinson.  You know about Sugar Ray?  OK.  Tony Zale was a great fighter, World War or no war.  So Tony Zale is coming to town.  This is before television so the world champions made tours so that fight fans could see them in the ring.  Well, we got up some guys to take off a Saturday to go see Tony Zale.  He was going to appear in a couple of gyms around town, and for two bucks you could see him mix it up with some local fighter.

“So we’re at this gym waiting for Tony to arrive, and no middleweight is anxious to get in the ring with the champ.  The champ never wants to look bad against a local boy who's trying for an instant reputation so he don’t mess around.  These are usually two or three-round exhibitions, but the local guys generally get knocked on their ass.  So the owner of the gym gets excited and starts begging for a middleweight.  Of course, we push your daddy forward.  The guy finally gets your dad into borrowed trunks and shoes for a twenty-dollar guarantee, one or two rounds, however long he can last.

“Hey, your dad looked good.  He was cut like a fighter, no stomach, big biceps and forearms, good legs.  The owner of the gym would have shit a brick if he had known how hard your daddy could hit.

“So in comes the champ with his people, in his silk robe, wearing the championship belt, ready to fight for a few minutes after signing autographs.  We’re with your daddy, maybe a little afraid of what we have pushed him into.  Then, finally, they get in the ring with a real referee, and the champ gets a laugh by saying to your daddy, ‘Take it easy on me, kid.’

“Right from the bell, it’s clear that Tony is not fooling around.  He is hitting hard, but your daddy is catching everything on his gloves and arms.  He is moving real good on his feet.  Like a pro.  But he's not throwing any punches.  All defensive.  God!  He survived the round without taking any punishment.  We cheered our asses off.  Tony’s corner was not too happy about it.

“So Tony says at the beginning of the second round to get a laugh, ‘Try to hit me, kid.’

“Tony hits your daddy with a left-right combination punch that rocked him for the first time.  I guess the champ thought he had hurt him and could finish him off with a good right hand.  That was a big mistake because your daddy was a hell of a counter puncher.  He caught Tony’s right hand lead with his left and stepped across it with that six-incher real tight.  The champ went down like somebody opened up a trap door underneath his feet.  The gasp from the crowd must’ve cleared the room of flies.  I swear.  Your dad backed up from the body like he had done murder.  The champ’s corner people jumped into the ring and went to reviving him.  He was out cold when they first got to him.

“Then there was cussing and screaming that the gym had slipped in a ringer on the champ.  Set him up.  That’s what his people claimed.  They got Tony to his feet, but he was still on queer street.  His eyes just wouldn’t focus.  He had to be helped through the ropes, never saying a word.  Then on with the robe and out quick to their cars.  The gym owner was so damn mad that he refused to pay your daddy the twenty dollars and locked himself in his office until we left.  I told your daddy that he should keep the trunks and jock, the ring shoes, and the mouthpiece since the man refused to pay him, but your daddy wouldn’t do it.

“We looked in the newspaper the next day, but there was no mention of the fight.  Tony Zale got out of Norfolk and probably never wanted to come back.  Maybe a hundred people saw what happened that day, but who would believe them if they told the story?  Who’s this guy who knocked out Tony Zale?   A shipyard machinist?  Go on.  That could never happen.”

My dad taught me the basic skills of boxing, but the real fight training was given to me by our neighbor Dick Sherbondy, whose garage rear window faced our backyard fence.  Mr. Sherbondy, my father told me, had been the U.S. Army middleweight champion during the World War II years, a time when there were millions of warriors in the Army.  The garage had been fitted out with a hanging heavy bag and a speed bag mounted to one wall.  Once invited, I became a regular bag-pounder and a speed demon with a jump rope.

Mr. Sherbondy then began to coach me on my footwork and a style of boxing that emphasized counter punching.  From this training, I began to enter amateur boxing events where I was never knocked down and lost only one fight.

I was such a tough 16-year-old that my father and a Scandinavian friend chided me for being jobless that summer.  Scandinavian boys as young as fifteen worked on merchant ships, I was told.  In response, I obtained a passport and approached a family friend who was the Swedish-Norwegian Consulate for a job on a merchant ship.  My parents thought my initiatives were senseless until I was offered a job as a third cook on the M.S. Vinni, a Norwegian coal freighter.  Within eight hours, I had my fit-for-duty physical, my seaman's papers, and I was onboard the Vinni as its only native English-speaking crewmember.

The Vinni followed the northern route to Europe that took it out of Hampton Roads in Virginia along the East Coast of the United States, past New York and Boston within range of American rock and roll radio stations.  The course then veered away from Nova Scotia and the island of Newfoundland in a great arc across the North Atlantic, with the tip of Greenland a distance to port, and the passage between Iceland and Scotland to negotiate before entering the North Sea nearly equidistant between the coast of Norway and Aberdeen on the Scottish side.  Across the North Sea lay the German ports and their industrial hunger for coal.  As the Vinni crossed the mid-ocean canyon, she entered an area mined with icebergs.  The summer heat in the northern latitudes had caused ancient glaciers to calf mountains of blue ice into the sea.  The color was an indication of the great pressure that had compressed the ice to such an extreme density that even months at sea would not melt it.  This was the very sea that had claimed the invincible Titanic.  Captains and navigators marked it well.

Unfortunately, the ocean off Greenland was also a famous fog bank as the result of the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream colliding with the Arctic flows from the north.  After August, the Vinni would choose a more southerly route out of respect for the North Atlantic.

Before the cooler climes and fog enveloped the ship, the crew was taking advantage of excellent weather and smooth sailing.  On the roof of the after-deck house where ropes, canvas, and winch equipment were stored, a boxing ring had been erected, and the second officer was giving instructions to about ten off-duty crewmembers.  By the time I completed my afternoon work and discovered the activity, two men were already sparring to the enthusiastic encouragement of the bystanders.  I climbed the ladder and joined the recreation without thinking about putting on the gloves.

Since I had learned to box, I had watched the fights on television and had witnessed ringside—at the Norfolk Boys Club or at competitions— hundreds of professionals and amateurs practicing their sport. Watching the Europeans put on the gloves and spar with each other was one of the most ridiculous exhibitions of boxing ineptness that I had ever seen.  If the officer had ever been in the ring for a real refereed fight, I would have been surprised at the fact by the way he coached his fighters.  All of them that I saw perform telegraphed their punches, dropped their guards on body feints, and displayed no footwork balance to put power behind any of their punches.

Suddenly it seemed the officer was gesturing for me to put on the gloves.  A taller, heavier German kid was waiting to spar with me.  Mickey Mouse, the muscle-bound deckhand, and some others were egging him on.  The American vs. the German.  It had appeal to the Scandinavians who had an old grudge against the invading Germans, and a new one against the exploitive Americans who smacked most Europeans across the face with their almighty dollars.  Let them hit each other hard.  What’s a little blood among enemies?  That seemed to be the attitude of the crowd, and the German boy—a twenty-year-old from the engine room—seemed willing to be tested.

The officer reminded us that we were just sparring, just practicing, but no one seemed to believe the caveat.  If the officer had not been present, wages on who would quit first would have been made in a heartbeat of expectations.  The smart money would probably have gone down on the German just on consideration of his advantage in size.  The fact that I had pushed away the gloves when they were first offered only confirmed the favorite.

When the round began, I was casual enough in my defense to encourage the German to hit me but caught all my adversary’s punches on my gloves.  It was quickly apparent to me, to borrow Dick Sherbondy’s favorite phrase, that the German could not have hit me with a handful of corn.  He just did not have the skills or power to defeat my trained defenses.  That I had yet to throw any punches further encouraged the German to go after me, but he lashed out in vain.

I decided to teach the larger man a boxing lesson so when the German overstepped and missed with a right hand, I moved in close and caught the boy with a left hook that dropped him to his knees.  Few of the onlookers had even seen the punch.  Some thought the German had slipped on the canvas-draped deck.  But the German knew that he had been hit hard, and he didn’t like it.  He didn’t like it one damn bit.  He decided to overwhelm me with a rush of determination and a flurry of punches.  I withstood the charge with instinctive footwork and saw the anger in the German boy’s flushed face. He looked to the officer to stop the fight; but the officer, pleased with the action and the excitement of the crew, waved his arms together for us to continue.  I didn't want to hurt my opponent, and I was in no condition or frame of mind to continue the athletic farce much longer.  So when the German gave me the next opening, I rocked him with a hard right-hand counter punch that spun the German around and caused him to fall to the canvas on his side.  Bewildered, he looked up from the canvas, wondering who or what had hit him.  I wanted to take off my gloves, but the German got up behind me and wanted revenge.  The officer asked if he was okay, and then, without consulting me, he signaled the fight to resume.

“What happened to the bell?” I asked in frustration.  No one seemed to understand.

Now the German was really mad.  He did not want to box so much as he wanted to charge me and punish me by rough wrestling with his elbows and knees.  At the first opportunity, I set him up for a combination punch.  The left-hand lead stunned the German.  The right hand that followed by a fraction of a second knocked him unconscious.

The knockout shocked the noisy crowd into concerned silence and scared the hell out of the second officer.  He had made no provision in his game of boxing for an injury.  The officer knelt at the German’s side, tapping his face, praying to his God that the boy was alive.  Within a few seconds the boy—sprawled awkwardly on the deck—blinked his eyes, and opened his mouth to test his jaw.  With help, he sat up.  Mine was one of the sober faces that came into focus in the circle above him.  I had already thrown down my boxing gloves.  When the German finally was helped to his feet, he pushed off his gloves with a kind of disgust.  He did not look at me.  He allowed two crewmembers from the engine room to support him down the ladder, and he went off with the second officer to the sickbay room where he would be ordered to lie down and be checked every hour by a flashlight in his eyes for signs of a concussion.

I walked away alone from the after-deck house.  The men who had witnessed the fight had either gone with the officer and the German to sickbay or were too stunned by the events to approach me. Back in my cabin, I resolved not to tell anyone on the ship about my boxing history.  I was no gunfighter who desired to be tested by other gunfighters who might pick a fight.  Swen and Rolf, my Scandinavian sponsors, had advised me to keep a low profile onboard ship.  Well, knocking a fellow crewmember unconscious was not exactly taking the low road.  Olav, my cabin mate, had not seen the fight, but Mickey Mouse would surely tell him.  I guessed that the steward, my boss, would hear about it, too.

I was not really worried about the German.  I had knocked boys unconscious before in the ring, and in a few neighborhood fights, and they had all recovered.  The padded gloves had prevented me from breaking the German’s jaw.

“Gee,” I thought, “I only hit him four times.”

If the boxing exhibition had been the single factor in establishing my name aboard ship, I might have slipped back into the obscurity of the scullery.  As it happened, however, my image on the Vinni took a quantum leap the following night by virtue of a Hollywood film shown for the crew in their dayroom. The movie was more than ten years old.  It was making the rounds among merchant ships that traded their canister entertainments tit for tat.  That the 1947 film Killer McCoy—starring Mickey Rooney, Brian Donlevy and Ann Blyth—flickered noisily in the Vinni dayroom within 29 hours of my fight was a star-crossed coincidence.  The word-of-mouth on the event itself had just had time to reach every ear on the ship before the film was run.

Killer McCoy is a fight film.  Mickey Rooney as McCoy is a diminutive boxer with a devastating right hand.  Usually his ring opponents are much larger and less wholesome than the hero.  In the plot, McCoy, by extortion, is forced to take cruel and unusual punishment until the round picked by some wicked gamblers.  Then he is expected to knock out his opponent on cue. In some fight scenes, McCoy is beaten half to death before the round with the bets arrives.  Miraculously, McCoy delivers to the cheers of the movie audience.

The connection between the film characters and the fight on their own ship seemed immediately obvious to the crewmembers in the darkened dayroom.  I, the American, was Killer McCoy.  For as long as I remained on the ship, I was referred to as Killer.  I was now known, recognized, and celebrated by every crewmember, with perhaps the exception of the engine room German.  In ways I could not have anticipated, I was a shipboard celebrity.

 

Andrew Keating is an author of fiction living in Baltimore. He also teaches writing and literature at several colleges in Maryland and has over five years of editorial, advertising and public relations experience. He holds an MFA from University of Baltimore and an MBA from Johnson & Wales University. Andrew is the founding editor of Cobalt Review (cobaltreview.com). His first collection of short fiction, PARTICIPANTS (participantsbook.com), was published in December of 2012 by Thumbnail Press.

Confessions of the Slower Sprinter

Always my feet are a split second behind my heart,
almost winners. My chest is nearly
thick enough to reach the tape
and snap it louder than the gun.
Imagine me wearing the magic number,
running toward the award of a woman
who would change her name for me.

For the first time I see more than your back,
its number one stuck out like a finger,
or an old lecture, or a sign that says
stop do not pass. Now I hear
for the first time your soles sucking
behind me, taking deeper and slower
breaths through their rubber lips,
twisting your muscle into silence.

Then my lungs gather a second wind of pride;
the wind behind me spins you around.
My chest swells towards the tape
to measure itself in the volume of cheers
The first failure of your feet does not slow me down.
I run past smeared applause and the blindness of cameras,
towards rehearsed modesty and trophetic gleamings.
I run to make speeches with my head bowed
in your shadow, to praise you and take your cup, saying,
“He who is weighted with trophies
does not run as fast.”
I drink ice water from a trophy already engraved
with your name, a prize now full of my lips,
as I freeze the thought that, when you passed me,
you slipped on my sweat.

A Peek into the Absurd and Inevitable Future of Our Favorite Disappointment

The 2022 NBA Dunk Contest begins with an enormous American flag descending from the rafters like a parachute, covering the court in a spangled carpet. We, in our living rooms, watch Paul McCartney and John Cougar Mellencamp descend as well, girdled in harnesses, crooning, “Ain’t that America.” Madonna joins them on stage dressed as a sexy Betsy Ross, with a stars-and-stripes halter top and pioneer cap. Halfway through the song, McCartney and Mellencamp let go of their instruments, which bolt back up into the rafters, and zip themselves down from the top of their heads to their toes. We discover that it is not the aging icons at all, but pop sensations Dr. Bang and Nutz $upreme, who launch into their party hit “Space Hump Alert.” Madonna reveals herself to be Madonna, but with even fewer clothes. On cue, we hump the space around us.

Marv Albert greets us on screen, and we are amazed that though his skin has become mottled and ashen, his hair remains a vibrant black, and his voice is as velvety as ever. Welcome, he says, to the 2022 China National Petroleum Slam Dunk Contest! Before the contest begins, he tells us, we must first revisit some of the classic moments of Dunk Contest History. A montage of images flashes before us, featuring dunkers from bygone eras: Michael Jordan, Larry Nance, Vince Carter, Blake Griffin. Dr. Bang and Nutz $upreme provide the background music. Some of us go into the kitchen to gather snacks; the rest of us space-hump. 

The rookie dribbles and stares at the hoop with intense concentration. At once, he bolts into a run, approaching the basket with lightning speed. He leaps, twists, pumps, and reverse jams the ball behind his head. We hold our breath, anxious. Walking away from the hoop he uses his jersey to wipe sweat from his forehead. He high-fives a fan in the front row. We watch and wait. The rookie grabs a bottle of water and squirts some into his mouth. He glances from the judges to the scoreboard. What’s he got up his sleeve?

 
Doug Cornett is a writer and teacher living in Portland, Oregon. He earned his B.A. in English from Skidmore College, and his M.F.A. in creative writing from Portland State University. His work has previously appeared in such journals as Superstition Review, Vestal Review, Fringe Magazine, and elsewhere.

       1. You Can Throw Out Basestealers, But What Else Ya Got?

Johnny Bench
is a monkeywrench
thrown into the air,
not a five-tool player.

       2. Get Help For Your Addiction Before It Causes Real And Permanent Problems You Can’t Get  
           Out From Beneath

Pete Rose
wears pantyhose
as sheer as he can get,
having lost a bet.

       3. On Receiving A Gift Basket After A One-Night Stand

Derek Jeter
isn’t a cheater
say sports scribes in New York
though his dates call him a jerk.

      4. Accept The Consequences Of One’s Actions

Barry Bonds
is cooled with palm fronds
waved by hire hands—
his last remaining fans.

       5. The Old Stadium Needs Taxpayer Funding To Pay For An Upgrade To Its Amenities
          Including An Increase In The Number Of Commodes In Women’s Restrooms

Adam Dunn
hits a long home run
but you can’t enjoy it
sitting on the toilet.

Macca's gi reeked, and for good reason. He hadn't washed it in five years and while some (including his mother, girlfriend and a few work colleagues) thought this to be unspeakable, Macca didn't care.

 
Alexander Hay is the proud owner of a BJJ white belt and the cleanest gi in Christendom. He's also something of a sci-fi and fantasy writer with work published in the UK for outlets such as Jupiter Sci Fi, Pollutoand Nature magazine's 'Futures' section. 'Gi Force' is his first venture into sports fiction, though other tales of hilarious ringworm outbreaks and living with groin injuries must surely await...

My grandson and his dad toss a football around; I smile at their banter and laughter. The barefooted boy chases a pass, dancing across the pea-stone driveway. All I see of dad is white hands and face, an occasional glow of his cigar. Two lawn mowers still duel. No one's eager to go inside, where a big pot of chili simmers. We don't so much rage against the dying of the light as indulge a little Yankee contrariness.

Post-Season

Football

Down forty to zero in the first quarter
Is like dealing with the lengthy illness

Of someone he cared for deeply—
Time to talk, laugh, and grieve.


Swimming

Still in the water waiting for the last
Competitor to touch the pad, she tastes

Unlike the victor that familiar trace of iron
And smoke on the back of the tongue.


Baseball

Worried that he’s taking the playoff loss
Too hard, his father tracks him down

In the weeds behind the barn to find him
Constructing a fortress from plywood scraps.


Basketball

By late July and with still no word even from
Junior colleges, he attempts to piece together

Every second of what was now his last game—
The minutes, the substitutions, the cheers.


Golf

From her car window on the edge of the course,
She spots him alone on the fourteenth green

Bundled in a heavy coat putting with gloves on,
Then walking with head down against the wind.


Volleyball

What she learned was standing her ground.
One’s territory is to be protected at all costs,

She reflects as she drives beyond the fields
Into the vast open country burned by the sun.


Track and Field

He thinks as he rolls out of bed just before noon
One should have a tape at the conclusion

Of every challenge, with a timer to jot down
How well you did, and a coach to chew your ass.


Tennis

Each day after her final match she passes the court
And takes a quick glance to gauge the right time

To begin hitting balls, maybe testing her serve.
Today? No, definitely not today. Not quite yet.


Wrestling

He misses the clarity of mind and spirit,
That focus that made even his vision acute.

Lately his thoughts assume a battle stance,
Stalling with one reversal after another.


Rodeo

Steak tastes better when it costs a broken arm
Or bruised hip. Even the air is clearer as he now

Walks among horses against which he fought,
Tumbled, and cursed for seven long months.