Remember the word “party line”? It meant that everyone in your town who wanted to could hear exactly what you were saying. How fucked up is that? Wasn’t that great?

Remember when every stray dog was a love story and the snow that night cleared the crust that had gummed my eyes shut? No, me neither, but fuck it. Let’s get lit one last time. 

 I wish I had that glorified high school / experience— where some boys / are chugging expired strawberry liqueur / and everyone, I mean everyone, / is sprawling on the grasscarpet

When I exhaust all other forms of exploration, / this landscape will deny me at the border; / & I will turn my gaze toward a darkening / sky filled with stars I no longer recognize.

Sometimes I say novels ruined me in the way they ruin all young bookish girls, slowly and tenderly rotting out the light and making room for the sweet dark.

Remember, there’s a light emitting from you and it's not just your cellphone. / The Internet is a scorched wasteland. / But you've walked through worse places / on your way to work.

It means nothing now but it meant enough then, enough to change a life, to alter the smooth rhythmic turning of the world. 

He doesn’t have any friends and doesn’t want any.

That’s the only way Mays can pitch, 

because he doesn’t play the game 

of fraternity formed on summer ballfields. 

Me at my most beautiful. Me locked in. Me sacrifice stance.

He could say from experience

that Babe Ruth was an asshole,

but he never said it on the field.

How fucking weird is the knuckle ball?

That was the year Dave Kingman’s pop fly never came down at the Metrodome
Nineteen players were ejected during the Padres/Braves brawl
Angel Mike Witt threw a perfect game against the

Before the nasty glances, which I sense to be for me, I shake my downcast head, grin in disappointment, and mutter “Damn.”

While waiting in my car outside your house I counted thirteen wrinkled ticket stubs I’d tucked inside the glovebox after games
to serve as some reminder of the season so far.

Baseball is, if nothing else, a reason, and so it is everything:

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

Then something funny happened / after months of imprisonment, / handled like/ animals, less than/ animals, / they started playing baseball.

Signals

When dead whales wash up on your shores,
it's not your insult to heaven, nor your fifteen-

        foot song carried

                       by high tide into flushing

That night in April. / That other night in April. 

soliciting chimps / in the shit cage

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

& spread / my arms out / like a giant squid

I want to be a zygote again. / I want to be a dumb plant.

When clearly it could be a mommy or even a child for that matter.

My god, I remember how badly I wanted her to see.