April 14, 2017 | Nonfiction
Playing Baseball Mediocrely but Playing Baseball with Pure Joy
Julia Dixon Evans
I wanted to focus on the real victims, unthinkable crimes against them, but I kept coming back to those batting cages, to that uniform in Coach B's house.
April 13, 2017 | Poetry
Baseball is a Reason
Thomas Locicero
Baseball is, if nothing else, a reason, and so it is everything:
"Wade Boggs"
Jeremy Rice
You look like you just walked out of a punt, pass and kick contest. We gotta make you look sick."
Randy Bass
Brian Robert Flynn
I’m thankful for the throwaways. Like the time the Bears lost in extra innings. Randy Bass, pre-Hanshin Tigers Randy Bass, had committed an error on a routine toss to the pitcher at first. It was
Two Poems Poorly Translated On Baseball During Wartime
Shane Kowalski
Then something funny happened / after months of imprisonment, / handled like/ animals, less than/ animals, / they started playing baseball.
Hateball
Bud Smith
I wanted to quit, and was too young to realize that I could just quit anything.
Self-Portrait as Home Run Ball
John McCarthy
But I see the look on his face, the lawn sprinklers waving back and forth like paper fans, the cicadas and their dim crescendoing dirge, and the panicgrass that the boy runs back through as he realizes what fetching me will cost him.
ROKUGATSU NO HEBI
Kris Hartrum
I wanted to see Akari and have a drink so we could get a little drunk and maybe take our clothes off.
Now the wren has gone to roost
Drew Knapp
The trees all richly clad, yet devoid of pride, fat with birds and the season, have called back days and years for the history they are giving me.
Interview with Meredith Alling
Gregory Lee Sullivan
What I like most about the story is that the grossness makes way for the sadness.
Shitstorm
Melissa Moorer
Now Dad would have to drive us to Mom’s in the shit-mobile, which probably wouldn’t start even if he could get the car doors open. Cows were standing pinned between the car and the wall and the doors had been frozen shut since the storm even without all the extra ice and frozen manure. Dad had tried pouring boiling water over the handles days ago, but the doors only worked while the handle was still too hot then froze solid again, worse than before.
Honey Mustard
Michael Fischer
He could kill me right now. I’m rail-thin, depression rotting the muscle off me since I got here. He’s big and strong and calls himself Faheem.
Interview with Lauren Grodstein
Rob Volansky
Grodstein is the author of four previous books, including the New York Times bestseller A Friend of the Family and the Washington Post Book of the Year The Explanation for Everything. She was kind enough to answer some of my questions regarding OUR SHORT HISTORY, out now from Algonquin Books.
Severance
Jason Metz
There are meetings in places that come disguised as something else.
Get Out / John Wick 2
Sean Kilpatrick
Honoring AV Club's restraining order against me from this day forward
Dear Editor: poems
Wheeler Light
Dear Editor, or Owl
Attached are poems in which I spin my head three hundred sixty degrees attempting to stare at myself. Attached are poems in which I attempt to eat myself
Good Touch, Bad Touch
Thomas Kearnes
Shane said I needed to be more social, network with the other teachers. I told him it was pointless.
A Cure for Wellness
Sean Kilpatrick
“I look forward to the time when I shall refuse to learn another thing, having accumulated errors enough.” Charles Fort
Below the Chandelier
Derick Dupre
He can’t respond to the man addressing him as Mr. Sport because he can’t talk, his tongue has been mangled, somewhat ineptly, and he sees the hilarity in this, being tortured by inept torturers, as another larger silent gentleman’s behind him, but if it weren’t him in the chair, if it were someone else and he was watching, he might be amused by these two dilettantes practicing the art of torture.
HInterland Transmissions: AIDS on a Toothbrush
Steve Anwyll
It's the middle of winter. My last submission was rejected with good cause. It went a little off the deep end.