On the 20th Anniversary of Randy Johnson Hitting A Dove Mid-Air with A Fastball During Spring Training in Tucson, Arizona

I.

There must be something there
about peace and the odds of it all:
a

I want to give Glenn Burke a high five / I want to give Glenn Burke a high five for seeing Dusty Baker’s raised hand and just hitting it / I want to give Glenn Burke a high five for coming out in 1978

My legs on yours, in the stadium lights,
I have only just learned your name.
You point, across the outfield,
at the worst fight we will ever have.

I can barely make it out in the crowd
of

The boys are back together and everyone's in town except it's desolate and nobody gives a damn

It was the first walk I’ve taken
through the neighborhood
so late in summer without
listening to a ballgame.

Those voices from Toronto,
Cincinnati, L.A.—the waves
of crowd noise

It took me all morning to build the fence.  I used old lawn chairs, cardboard boxes, and rusty sign posts from the dumpster behind 7-Eleven.  I meant for it to look like Camden Yards.  The right field

Across the basement, your best friend pitches graduation balloons like they’re weightless baseballs. You swing with a curtain rod that had fallen behind the couch (your mom will ask about that

Mike and Nick and Tom are already playing stickball in the back lot when Dad drops you off at P.S. 236. On one brick wall they’ve chalked a strike zone, on the floor is a powder-blue pitcher’s mound

you have probably peed with everyone you’ve ever loved, including the woman you do right now

Previously on...
Part 4  ||  Part 3  ||  Part 2  ||  Part 1 

Last year, Tim and I bought cardboard cutouts of ourselves ($129 each, apparently for charity) that watched every Athletics game in the stadium that we could not.

My husband Paul and I are drinking beers and eating hot dogs at the baseball stadium in San Francisco. It’s even a little boring, and I have my back to the field for a while so can I face my friends

In 1949 we had viewed television for three years on a 12” screen. It inhabited a large wooden box with doors that pulled out and covered the picture tube when not in use. For the most part in those

We were on vacation in Kansas City. Knowing I had never been to a major league game, my in-laws got my husband and me tickets to the Royals while they agreed to stay back at the hotel room with our

Bishop and I were smoking a joint on the pitcher’s mound. We drew dicks with our fingers next our school’s logo. It was mid-March, around midnight. I stopped drawing dicks and looked up at the empty

She was cursing at her TV. A Red Sox game was on. She was yelling at David Price, newly acquired from the Detroit Tigers. Price was behind in the count. I wanted to tell her that David Price was a

When he drops you off at home you realize the soles of your feet are covered in tar.

From the couch corner where 
his ass has crafted a killer dent
for the better part of a week,
my father begins shouting insane cuss words
at no one in particular – 
titty fucker bang bang, cunty

TOOLS OF IGNORANCE

“[the term] tools of ignorance...was meant to be ironic, contrasting the intelligence needed by a catcher to handle the duties of the position with the foolishness needed to play