What I do know: Janet Wellington made eye contact with me in the YMCA pool. I also never had a chance to look my mother in the eye and say goodbye.
Carrot Flowers
We are toward somewhere in the first sentence. There is June & us or us or June because that’s what’s left of it. I walk like a walk with a walk on the table. The walk is finding
On a cold and rainy Sunday afternoon when I didn’t want to walk outside: a box proclaiming to be synthetic urine for sale in Nirvana, next to Louie’s Tux Shop and across from C.J. Banks in the Muncie Mall, behind the counter where they sell glass pipes blown to resemble tiny carrots and octopi, next to a rack of Rasta wigs.
Neck Tattoo
Your neck tattoo spoke to me but I needed a
translator. Needed a nail gun, a barn wall to
respond to your forward advances. After a
night together, I woke to find that your
I turn 30 next month but I’m no longer afraid because I read somewhere that time is an illusion. I am purchasing an anti-aging moisturizer, just in case. It’s expensive, but money is no object. I’m worth four figures.
I was looking forward to ruining my chances of being able to run or march anywhere.
More than most players, examining Guerrero's life feels like voyeurism, or like wandering hospital corridors with your head on a swivel. When he was good, he was, as James suggested, astonishingly good... But his bad times were difficult to watch, and lacked the privacy that we'd all hope would greet our worst moments.
real / unreal
last night i had a dream
that my teeth fell
out all in a row.
i woke with them still
When I was a freshman in college (many years ago, before the marriage and the children and the divorce and the loss of faith in God), I saw a man order eight McDoubles at a McDonald’s on campus and then proceed to eat them all.
I’m meeting a friend for drinks and a Friday night concert; work is days, a train ride and a major city away.
the babies are most dangerous because
they have not learned how to control their venom
the way we make the same decisions over and over and over
I’ve been tasked with digitizing my father’s slides, a hundred or so he inherited from his aunt.
While they wrote about the never-ending snowstorm in the first pages of their novel: outside of their apartment, snow began to fall.
~
It was four days into the snow, into writing their novel,
i am your man
tall stranger man
you have sung a lot of songs
you fall in love often
and maybe
you lose some things along the way
but everything is all right
and none of this matters
I was going to see Verdi’s Falstaff with Robin. My driver said “I hate Bill de Blasio. The MTA is corrupt. Uber is corrupt. I’ve been driving taxi since 1993. I know New York, you said Lincoln Center
And yet, when it came to hitting a baseball, I always liked my odds.
The solidity of contact is registered first in the hands. The knowledge radiates outward from there.
“You can’t pee here,” Brendan tells me as I climb inside the doorway leading into the belly of the Green Monster. What he means is that you shouldn’t pee here. Manny Ramirez did once, during the
Old Seals Stadium is a shopping center now. It is a parking lot, a grocery store, a 24 Hour Fitness, a Ross Dress for Less, a Japanese dollar store. I get all my errands done at old Seals Stadium—all
I’m sitting on our carpet, legs crossed, beer in my crotch.
It's their first practice in good spring weather,
not only not raining, not cold, but full of light.
He said that Thompson could be the fastest to hit five hundred, a first ballot Hall of Famer, but I just nodded and sipped my coffee.
Blessed be the millwrights on the open hearth that awaited him; the nurses and elevator operators; secretaries; plumbers; electricians
Wrigley had put out a study claiming that gum chewing increased performance on assessments and my elementary school took it as gospel, sending letters home asking for us to bring it on test days. Marshall brought Big League Chew.
The first doctor who called said I couldn’t play. The scan showed stress fractures and the only remedy was rest. It would have been a blessing the diagnosis came between seasons but, for me,
Gaylord Perry toiled for twenty-two seasons in the majors, and the look on his face suggests it was hard toil indeed.
