Watching the game
from the dug out
the coach paces distracted by nothing

It soon became clear that he wasn't laughing at our tableau. Just at me. At my interpretation of a professional batter.

When I was nine my grandfather taped every episode of Ken Burns’s Baseball and mailed me the VHS tapes from Kansas City. I’d sit there in the basement where the TV was, pressing the Tracking button on

The veteran second baseman
is fiddling with his glasses in the twilight: The calculated
third baseman is scanning over the crowd for his family...

Usually when my parents went off to lead one of these weekend retreats, they’d leave all four of us kids to stay at the same place, usually with another retreat family, sometimes even people we already knew.

It felt like a belly flop
crammed into a calcified bounce house

At the end of the 90s, the MLB’s closest analogue was the WWF.

The helmet is slightly too big, and the interior foam padding is the texture of damp dough, thanks to Paula’s fat, sweaty head.

At first I thought he meant food, but he never asked what I wanted.

Eighty-five percent of the Earth’s surface is tarp

I never mentioned to the skipper
how my mother died

In Maine his whole life except the year there wasn’t work.

This will not work.

“How ‘bout it, Ronnie. Throw something Butch can hit. Try over the plate for once.”

​I knew a man, older, who was afraid to cry.

I was 11 and my buddy, Dennis, and I
kept hounding Coach Phillips for some chew

And by the third inning, it’s really, truly, shittily finished. “They gave us about twenty minutes of thinking we were in it,” Tim says. “Twenty minutes.”

Jenny Irish and I sat down to discuss her stunning debut, Common Ancestor, with Black Lawrence Press. Her prose poem, "A Brief History of Motivations" was published on our site in

He blew smoke from a loaned cigarette back into my hair, bar rag still in his back pocket from the shift that ended two hours ago. He didn’t understand why I didn’t want him to come over. “Surrender to the stuff, baby.” 

Even if it is addressed to you, this is a letter for me. If it were truly a letter for you, it would be written in sound, in the words that lilt on your tongue, rise a tempest in your rage,

The "UTOPIA STUDY" series is a form of experimental architectural photography that focuses on modern architecture in a number of American cities. Buildings and details within them are transformed into

I could have no path, no idea of what I should be or how I should live. I could skate through neighborhoods, where I wouldn’t find a Mormon church or anyone who knew I had strayed from the path I was raised to follow

My father inhales smoke from a lone Marlboro,
            shadowed against a sun colored like dead autumn leaves.
He gently cradles the barrel of tobacco between his pointer
            &

The funeral is over, Eliza is back at work, and she has eaten dinner at home three times now, once alone, even.

A Queer Translates Rilke

I long to know his self-described “epic head”
with my eyes closed. But for now, his torso
radiates from my screen like a delirious
lighthouse, like it is recharging my