bjj-sportliterate

by M.C.K. Carter

I ran yesterday — four miles. Late in the day, my route took me almost straight west. I ran past fields, fall-plowed too wet. Mounds of heaved dirt chewed up with corn stalks. Flat acres of soybean ground, level as a floor. Low in the sky, the sun had pulled cloud trails together like scarves of orange and rose. My smooth black leggings and the red-violet swash of my shoes contrasted against the sagging, settled asphalt.

The last thing the world needs is another essay on growing old. Seriously, again? What do I think I can add?

Two years ago, I read Mark Jacobson’s essay, “65,” which began by recounting the ages he considered “old” at different years of his youth: 37, 42, 52, and finally, 65.

At every stage of my life, I have stretched time out like a rubber band for an extra 10 years. I married at 30 and had my first child (our son) at 33. Started my doctorate at 40, then taught elementary art for three years, had our daughter when I was 44, and finished my dissertation at 47 — barely in time. It’s an odd chronology — like slides out of order in the carousel. But there they are: two children, a doctorate, a marriage. A whole life out of time, and out of sequence.

But it never bothered me. In the movie, Orlando, Tilda Swinton remains ageless and proceeds serenely through time, adroitly switching genders and partners with every century. I’d look at my face in the mirror. The idea of this self — a constant — looking out through eyes that work because a heart beats enough, seems plausible. Yep, still there.

Last year I turned 60.

And then, people started dying. Prince, David Bowie, and Alan Rickman — 59, 69, and 70, respectively. For the first time, the thought came: how much time do I have left? David Bowie is gone now forever — not a piece of performance art or a concept album to be revealed next week. Prince looked eternally 19.

If I die at 70, like Bowie and Rickman, I have 10 years.

Lucia Berlin, short story writer. Published 77 short stories. Died at 68.

Make the most of it, whispers the fairy godmother.

***

But more than my age led up to this running on the county roads.

First: my daughter is now 17. I did the math. When she’s my age, I’ll be 104, if I’m still alive. I’ve watched my in-laws and my own parents age. The slowing down starts about now, in the mid-sixties. The consequences of ignoring the body’s yellow warning lights (not red yet) begin to show. And it’s just easier to do less. For example, our family doctor told my dad when he was 63, his blood sugar was a bit high and he wanted to put him on a diet to bring it down. Dad’s-oh-so-Chicago reply: Bullshit.

My dad can hardly walk now. He despises his walker, a folding aluminum cliché. If he falls, my mother calls “the big house” (their name for it) and two burly men are sent to their duplex. They hoist him up and check for damages. If he’s lucky and he didn’t hit anything on the way down requiring stitches, my parents will thank them cheerfully, gratefully, all the while Dad muttering, Jesus Christ, getting old is a bitch, this is a helluva thing, goddamnmit, thanks guys, Jesus Christ am I bleeding somewhere? Shit. Barb get me band-aid, hell no I’m fine. Vertical posture re-attained, the reason he fell is forgotten and fades away. The convenient amnesia of an alpha-male. So, while he hates he can’t stand up on his own, hates the walker, hates this whole goddamn business of getting old — he hates exercising even more. The one thing that would help.

It is easy to see this from a distance, the tiny complexities and entanglements not quite visible. But I consider him a cautionary tale.

Second. My depression. In the parlance of our time I’m supposed to say: I live with depression. Which gives it a companion-like aura. Someone described it like wearing a lead vest. For myself, it’s like the lead covered my head and shoulders, pulling me into a stupor, like moving through slowly hardening concrete.

I ran in high school to lose weight — which never worked. And in college, it was an easy way to pass the required gym classes. I was a graphic designer in my twenties. I lived downtown in a renovated Victorian mansion and felt very smart and urban. But, learning on the job, I made some mistakes costing our department money. I began to fantasize driving my car off the interstate embankments.

My high school on the west side of town had a cross-country track that ran around and about through the neighboring fields like a Celtic knot overlaid on the acres of grass. Two or three times a week, I’d drive out there and run and run and run. It worked like drug and the effect lasted for about the next two days. It wasn’t like running away — it was running away. My super-power.

I remembered how that felt.

It took me six months to work up to these four miles. I started very slowly, setting my iPhone to time the laps. Run for two minutes, walk for a minute. Repeat eight times.

Whatever the chart said, it took me longer to get there. Our family doctor had cautioned me: after the age of 45, it takes twice as long (or more) to build muscle mass. So, I didn’t push it. I accepted whatever I could do, and just kept on. I noticed that after the walking bits, running again was much easier. As much as it felt like I was running with cinderblocks for feet, if I walked for a bit, and then started up again, those first glorious minutes were ease and grace. And afterwards, my skin radiated, capillaries pulsing.

My shoes were three years old and an ache under the ball of my foot began appearing at the end of every run. By October, I decided I needed a new pair of shoes.

I took a list of the top four women’s running shoes to our sports store. Narrowed my eyes at the Nike swashes all over the windows, on the shoes posed in the small windows facing the mall, and on the t-shirts draped from the walls above the racks.

I read my list to the smiling young woman at the counter. Yes, they had three of the four and a newer model of the number one shoe.

Self-consciously, I ran around the store wearing each pair. The first shoe was the best. It was soft, and yet my whole foot felt supported. The second, its new updated version, had a firmer ride. The other two were good, but no comparison to the first pair.

I felt elated. I was not going gently into this good night. This new commitment needed to be affirmed. I asked for and was shown two pairs of leggings and a new running bra.

Thursday morning, I rolled out of bed. Grabbed the new leggings and unfurled them. The black spandex nylon sheathed my legs as I pulled them on, the curving silhouette of my calf against the rug. The widest part of the waistband spread firmly across the small of my back and the front curved slightly downward. In real life, my stomach rolls gently out. I had this stomach before I had my children and I have long accepted it as feature of my personal topography. But this amazing garment made it… not invisible, but somehow a more congruent curve to my body. The rounded belly on the Nike of Samothrace. In black lycra.

I’d only been out of bed 10 minutes.

The running bra came next. It had a swash. It was grey, snug, and hugged my breasts firmly to my ribcage.

Another look in the mirror. Me, but a faster-looking, hint-of-power me. A more-like-Scarlet-Johannsson me.

I had left the new shoes in their box. Now I set it on the bed, and lifted the lid. The tan tissue paper, translucent and crisp, crackled as I pulled it aside. The shoes lay nestled together. Deep red-violet glowed through the black mesh fabric of the uppers.

Radioactive. Glowing embers. Veiled power.

I pulled one out. The white sole layered with red-violet. It was light. Airborne.

The cushioning inside enveloped my feet as I put them on. The thick, soft laces were black, trimmed with white and knotted with a cushiony grip.

The last thing before leaving the house: I turned my cell phone to the U2 station. In a wave, music flooded my ears. The pulsing beat filled me, carried me. The air was cool, icing across my thighs, winding up the sleeves of my sweatshirt.

My stride found its rhythm and I turned onto the road. These are my legs. This is my heart pounding. My lungs breathing. The music plays on. I am utterly myself under this dome of sky.

Ten years is long enough I think. It’s plenty of time.

 

M.C.K. Carter lives near Alexandria, Indiana. She has an M.A. in creative writing from Ball State University, where she teaches Art Education and Art History. This is her second essay to be published in Sport Literate. Other essays have appeared The Atticus Review, and Juxtaprose Literary Magazine. She lives on a family farm with two Welsh Cobs.

 

 

Q&A with JD Scrimgeour

by William Meiners

JD Scrimgeour is finishing up his 21^st year of teaching at Salem State University. In a town best known as the site for one of America’s oldest of witch hunts, Scrimgeour has adapted a teaching style to better suit his students, published work in three genres (poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction), and provided a great deal of reflection on the games he’s played.

One poetic essay, “Living in the Outfield,” earned Scrimgeour the top prize in Creative Nonfiction’s “Writing About Baseball” contest. The essay, he says, poured out of him like a poem where he tried to avoid conventional sentiments. Hence the line in the first paragraph: “There are no fathers and sons in the outfield.” Except for maybe that short time when Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Junior played together in Seattle.

William Meiners: In your award-winning book, Themes for English B: A Professor’s Education in and Out of Class, you talk a lot about race, about class, as well as how much you learn from your own students at Salem State. In general, how are students different now from 12 years ago?
JD Scrimgeour: I’m going to qualify this answer by saying that I wouldn’t trust it, since it has so much to do with where I am in my teaching career. Here goes: I continue to admire Salem State students for their pluck and endurance. Salem State students today do more of their homework than they used to; they seem to be more obedient (subservient?) than in years past. They also are ridiculously overworked and generally stressed and depressed.

The obedience might sound like a bad thing, but what a joy it is to have a class discussion when most of the students have done the reading! On the other hand, they also seem more obedient to their true overlords — their bosses at their crappy jobs who won’t give them a night off to see a play or poetry reading on campus.

Students have always worried about getting a job after they graduate from college, but now they are worrying about a job before they start. And, of course, they are working more than ever while trying to cram in as many courses as possible. They are feeling the squeeze that the middle-class is experiencing in the U.S.

I fear for our students, and for higher education. Yet I suspect desperate situations will lead to necessary action. I see sprouts of activism in students today. I find that heartening.

WM: There’s a nod to Langston Hughes with this book, beginning with the title and the essay, “Me and Langston,” which details some of your earliest attempts at poetry as a Columbia University student in the mid-1980s. How has your “relationship” with Hughes changed over the years?
JD: Our first loves often are inexplicable. We like the poets we like irrationally. Hughes’ sense of social justice is mine (though I suspect my blinders are different than his). He knows that there are both cruel systems and cruel people in the world, but, as he says in The Big Sea, “most people are generally good.” I feel that we have no choice but to believe that, too.

Hughes also mocks pretension, and celebrates our small failures, those weaknesses that make us human. He’s got a great little poem in the voice of a guy who plays the numbers (the underground lottery in Harlem). The guy swears that if he ever hits his number he’ll stop playing: “gonna salt every dime away…I ain’t gonna/play back a cent.” But then he adds, “(Of course I might/combinate a little/with my rent.)” I love this poem irrationally. Why? Because it shows us real human behavior without judgment, with warm humor. Or maybe it’s just because I can’t stick to a no-sugar diet.

I never was fond of Hughes’s overtly political or inspirational verse, which tends to get a lot of play, especially these days. Like James Baldwin said, Hughes kept stuff that “more disciplined” writers would have thrown away. Still, when he’s on, like in “Montage of a Dream Deferred,” well, I fall in love all over again.

WM: There’s a rhythm to basketball — from the particular game itself, to a player finding that zone where everything seems to go in the bucket. I know you’ve explored that through some of your poetry. Can talk about how your own basketball game may have influenced your poetry?
JD: I’m not sure it has that much. In the essay, “Announcing My Retirement,” I draw a few connections, but I also suggest there may be more differences than similarities.  Basketball is what I did to avoid writing poetry, to escape words.

WM: Sport Literate published what seems like more of a narrative poem, and you’ve obviously published fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. I’m curious about your approaches to each genre. Do you have a favorite? What do you find, if anything, limiting in one of the genres?
JD: I never planned to write in different genres. Very simply, I gravitate toward whatever makes it easy for me to write. There was a time when I was writing dramatic monologues because the voices I inhabited felt fresher and more human than the other poetry I’d been trying to write. And then suddenly they stopped, and, though I wanted to write more of them, I wasn’t able to, so I moved on to something else.

Poems come to me only occasionally, and then I dink around with them for a long time. Curiously, I need a longer stretch of time to write a poem than to write prose. I have to draft an entire poem (or a section of a long poem) in one sitting. I can use a spare 15 minutes to write two paragraphs of a short story or essay, but I can’t just “make progress” on a poem.

I find poetry has the most limitations, as well as the most possibilities. Poetry not only has a limited audience, but often I feel that poetry’s audience goes to the genre for different reasons than I do; they want flashes of scintillating language, density, and complexity. My own preferences and aims in poetry are more like those mentioned by Elizabeth Bishop in one of her letters: spontaneity, accuracy, and mystery.

I feel that the essay might be the best form to expand a reader’s aesthetic (and consciousness). There aren’t as many preconceived notions of the form, and so readers don’t have their guard up in the same way as they might with poetry or fiction.

But fiction? Recently fiction has been what has enabled me to write. I’m writing a collection of stories about youth baseball, based on years of coaching my sons in Little League. It has made me realize how much I came to know that environment, and how much I assumed. It’s a way to test out what I thought I knew about that world by pressing the buttons of class, race, and masculinity and seeing “how folks do.”

WM: “Spin Moves” explores your history with pickup basketball. It’s also the last essay in your book. What are the biggest life lessons you take away from the basketball court? I also read the essay on your “retirement.” What do you miss most about playing?
JD: I’ve learned that people care if you’re good, but they usually care more about whether you’re a good teammate, whether you’ll be in the right place or make the right pass or understand what’s needed in a particular situation. I try to be a good teammate.

I’ve never been in therapy. That’s probably because I played basketball. The nonstop pace cleansed my mind. I could focus only on the next moment on the court. I miss that tremendously, as now my head gets cluttered with Trump, and grading, and email. It seems that I can never empty it.

J.D. Scrimgeour is the author of the basketball memoir Spin Moves and Themes For English B: A Professor’s Education In and Out of Class, which won the AWP Award for Nonfiction. He’s also published three collections of poetry, The Last Miles, Territories, and Lifting the Turtle. His essay, “My Outfield,” won Creative Nonfiction’s “Writing About Baseball” contest. He runs the creative writing program at Salem State University. “Today, Late April” is part of a longer piece, “Forest River Park,” which is from of a collection in-progress of stories about baseball, Hit By Pitch. The title story appears in the most recent issue of Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature.

William Meiners is the editor-in-chief at Sport Literate.

Q&A with Rus Bradburd

by Nicholas Reading

Recruiting Shawn Harrington to New Mexico State from Marshall High School in Chicago, Rus Bradburd described him as an “exceedingly smart, unselfish, and fearless” basketball player. Then an assistant coach, Bradburd was known for bringing Chicago players to the southwest. A decade prior, he lured the future NBA great Tim Hardaway to Texas at El Paso.

In 2014, when Harrington was back in Chicago coaching at Marshall, his unselfish fearlessness was on full display, as he covered his daughter’s body to protect her from drive-by bullets in a case of tragic mistaken identity. In saving his daughter’s life, Harrington was left paralyzed.

“Shawn’s shooting was all over the Chicago news. A coaching friend texted me about it within an hour of the incident, so I began tracking it on the internet,” says Bradburd, now a creative writing professor at New Mexico State. “Although I hadn’t seen Shawn in 20 years, I had spoken to him when his mother was killed in 2003, so I still had his phone number. I waited a week to call, but I thumbed through the New Mexico State basketball programs to rattle my memory of his time playing for us at New Mexico State — which is where things got complicated.”

That complication eventually led to the book, All the Dreams We’ve Dreamed: A Story of Hoops and Handguns on Chicago’s West Side, which will be released on May 1, 2018.

 Nicholas Reading: Your book invites the reader into the lives of Shawn Harrington and the Chicago West Side community. The value of making folks, who might be otherwise unknown, into very real, very living people, is immeasurable. You write intimately and personally about their experiences. What do you hope this portrait contributes to the national discussion about guns, violence, and the state of our communities?
Rus Bradburd: I only wanted to tell Shawn Harrington’s story, and the story of the Marshall High School community. At the outset I had very strong opinions about guns, cops, education, and the situation on the West Side of Chicago, but whenever I tried to address the bigger issues — or pretend I had answers — the book started to spin out of control. So I kept the story smaller, which of course became tricky as more and more Marshall players got murdered.

NR: It is one thing to sympathize, even empathize, with someone who has experienced hardship. It’s quite another to initiate the task of writing a book and giving someone’s experience a wider audience. How did you arrive at the idea for this project?
RB: Initially I was only advocating for Shawn, writing to friends who were journalists: Hey! Here is an astonishing story of courage. I was going to sleep at night thinking of Shawn’s trouble, waking up and wondering how I might help. And the more he was ignored — and I was ignored — the more determined I was to keep banging on my drum. I have a daughter the same age as Shawn’s younger one, so the act of heroism in saving a girl’s life was profoundly moving.  Finally, Alex Kotlowitz [bestselling author of There Are No Children Here] said to me, “Why don’t you write this yourself?”

NR: What is so striking about sports is that it is often a confluence of social, racial, economic, political concerns. If Shawn’s story and your writing is a lens through which to closely examine our society, what issues does your book bring into focus?
RB: I think people will read the book differently. As they should, I suppose. Basketball, more than any other sport, gives us a window into African American culture. Even in Chicago, though, you can go through your entire life and never really come in contact with what it’s like for millions of Americans on a day-to-day basis. My hope is that in the specifics of Shawn Harrington’s story that there might be a more universal feeling of empathy. Although I only wanted to tell his story, there are issues of health care, race, guns, unions, poverty, education, basketball, and community policing all swimming around in the book.

NR: What do you think are the most damaging or prevalent misconceptions about communities ravaged by gun violence?
RB: I think the Black Lives Matter stance is badly misunderstood at times. Here’s where it became real to me: nothing tears apart a community like an unsolved murder. In Chicago, there are far fewer murder detectives than there was a decade ago. That’s the institutionalized problem: shootings and killings are never brought to justice, and an unsolved murder encourages revenge. The closing of schools ruins neighborhoods, too. Marshall, when Shawn attended, had over 2,000 students. Today it’s below 400. Empty schools aren’t good for the community. Schools should be the center of the community.

NR: How did the team respond after Shawn was shot? What is their response when mounting numbers of teammates and friends are victims of gun violence? What does this response say about them? About their reality?
RB: One of the surprising things about writing the book is learning how everyone has a connection to the violence. This was mirrored for me in the 10 months I lived in Belfast: everyone had been touched by “The Troubles,” and people mostly didn’t want to talk about it. I was surprised that the players and coaches never talked about their own gun violence experiences, but maybe that’s just me: my impulse is to talk about something until I’m blue in the face. That’s something I learned from writing the Nolan Richardson biography, Forty Minutes of Hell: things don’t get better by not talking about them.

NR: The book opens with a quote from Langston Hughes that seems to both lament and hold dear a, “dream that’s almost dead today.” Obviously, an inspiration for the title of the book, but I wonder if you could explain how the poem speaks to you? What is the dream?
RB: To my ear, Langston Hughes has two voices speaking in the poem, and the refrain “America was never America to me” feels reflective of the West Side community of Chicago. I think if Shawn had saved a girl’s life in Iraq while on duty, he’d be on the cover of Time Magazine. Because it happened in Chicago, it’s just another shooting, and, in fact, a “good” story because he lived.  In any other Westernized country, Shawn would have a far better safety net than in America.

NR: Sports are sometimes relegated to mere pastime, entertainment, and maybe exercise. Though, it seems that the role of basketball in the lives of the folks you present is far from just a hobby. In your view, how does the sport, the gym, offer not only a haven from the streets, but mentor-ship, a way of surviving?
RB: Basketball can be a blessing, but only 20 or 25 boys play at every Chicago Public School. And in some ways, for the ballers, the game can be a mirage or a time-killer. For so many, once basketball season is over senior year, there’s the stark reality: Now what?  The game gave them discipline, teamwork, a goal. But what about when the game is over? And I think a more important question might be, “What about the other kids, the 90 percent who do not play?”

NR: What does Harrington say, what does the community say, what do you say about a hope for a solution to gun violence? You have brought to our attention, with intimacy and urgency, the faces and lives of people living in an America that many can’t fathom. You have called Harrington’s situation a “failure of America,” and I think the reader understands why. This question might be an unfair burden, but where do we go from here?
RB: I don’t know. One thing I stress is that there are great people who have dedicated their lives to ending the violence, so I’m modest about offering any solutions as the “new guy” who just arrived. While Shawn has remarkable courage and endurance, and so many of us find that inspiring, I think the big answers are complicated.  Poverty, education, family, community policing, ending the drug wars — they’re all tied in, but again, I only really know Shawn’s story. Yet, there’s the “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” idea that if you know one thing, you know the world. I guess I’m saying that I hope that reading about Shawn’s life might be a start — just as basketball was a window into a part of black culture for me, perhaps his story might a window into the West Side for others.

NR: What does Shawn envision for his family, the future of Marshall? For himself? And is his story unique?
RB: Shawn’s struggles are very much day-to-day. Get out of the house. Get his exercise. Go to therapy. Talk to Marshall kids and ex-players. That’s one of the great tensions in the book: I want him to be Jackie Robinson or Muhammad Ali, be the spokesman for progressive movements. He wants that stuff, sure, but it’s the daily grind that wears on him, I fear. The scariest part to me is that there are thousands — really, thousands — of young men in Chicago like Shawn who have been physically and emotionally torn apart by guns. There won’t be a book about many of the others, or not an in-depth study. But who will advocate for them?

NR: Writing about your relationship with Shawn you observe, “… our lives were intertwined. His success or failure would contribute to mine.” How has Shawn’s life changed your own?
RB: I believe that Shawn’s suffering and struggle stands for more — that it has enriched my life, as strange as that is to say. He’s both fully heroic and fully human. That’s part of the human psyche, sort of Joseph Campbell 101: The Hero makes things better for everyone else.

NR: Is there an experience or realization that you encountered over the course of writing this book that surprised you?
RB: Let me see if can answer that sideways.  What I miss most about coaching in Division I basketball — where I spent 14 years and made 8 NCAA tournaments — is the total, free health care. No waiting, no charge, no hassles, you get to see the doctor right away.  I’m fairly healthy, although not that young, so I don’t worry so much about health care. But seeing it up close, how you need a full-time advocate to battle the system — well, what kind of country is this?

NR: How does Shawn’s story, the story of gun violence in Chicago, and the story of hope fit into the national discussion on the subject?
RB: Dorothy Gaters, the legendary Marshall girls’ coach, says that Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School are not on the West Side. She’s right: it’s a national problem, and it’s uniquely American. The “line” is always drawn somewhere — I can’t own a bazooka or a tank or an ICMB, right? We just need to move the line. That’s happened so many times in American history, and it’s always a collective consciousness that changes. I hope Shawn’s life can be part of that conversation.

Nicholas Reading is the author of the chapbook The Party In Question (Burnside Review Press, 2007) and Love & Sundries (SplitLip Press, 2014). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, jubilat, Nimrod, Painted Bride Quarterly, and San Pedro River Review. He serves as the poetry editor for Sport Literate and teaches a freshman seminar on sports and literature at Butler University.

Rus Bradburd spent 14 seasons as a college basketball coach at UTEP and New Mexico State, then two more in Irish Super League. He is the author of All the Dreams We’ve Dreamed (Chicago Review Press, 2018), an examination of gun violence in Chicago; the novel-in-stories Make It, Take It (Cinco Puntos Press, 2014); the controversial Forty Minutes of Hell (HarperCollins/Amistad Books, 2010); and the memoir Paddy on the Hardwood: A Journey in Irish Hoops (University of New Mexico Press, 2006). He lives in New Mexico and Chicago.

Super Bowl Ring

by Michael Downs

The game ended, and then came the rush outdoors into the noisy February dark, fireworks and gunfire the exclamation points at the end of every hell yeah and damn right. Joyce shimmied on her porch.

Across the street, Kenny and Tracy’s daughter, Elsa (not yet a year) slept in her grandmother’s care.

All Sefton Avenue envied her parents — Kenny who worked for the team, and Tracy, unsettled at leaving her daughter for the first time. But when would she and Kenny ever have a chance like this again? So that night, as Elsa wrinkled her nose and made fists of her hands, her parents partied in the Big Easy, blinking away the glare of celebrities and their glitter and bling.

Months later, the ring arrived. Kenny first showed Joyce and even let her slide it on her finger. Word spread, and we all gathered to marvel. Diamond after diamond after diamond. A Raven on the face, Kenny’s name on one side. Nearby, Tracy watched, bouncing Elsa in her arms and grinning. We cradled the ring in our palms, felt its heft.

“What’s that?” Sylvia yelled from her fence.

Kenny brought it over for her to see. After, he knocked on Bert’s door.

Months earlier, just home from the hospital, he had carried infant Elsa door to door, the child for whom they had waited years and years. Elsa Bear, he called her. Little Elsa Bear.

 

Michael Downs’ debut novel, The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist, is forthcoming from Acre Books (May 2018). His other books include The Greatest Show: Stories (Louisiana State University Press) and House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City (University of Nebraska Press), which won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize.

Driving by a Baseball Park in Winter

by David Evans

Three spindly-legged crows were occupying
a piece of snow crust between second and third,
their beaks pointed toward home plate, as if
waiting for a hot grounder to scramble their wings,
or a frozen-rope single to sizzle right over their heads,
making them duck . . .

when I slowed down for
a closer look they lifted and turned around as one and
flew way out over deep center, heading, I guessed,
for the scattered concessions in the Western Mall
parking lot on 41^st Street.

 

 

David Evans has had nine poetry collections published. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in many magazines and anthologies including Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature, The Norton Book of Sports, Splash: Great Writing About Swimming, and American Sports Poems. He was a Fulbright Scholar twice in China, and a professor and writer-in-residence at South Dakota State University. He was also poet laureate of South Dakota for 12 years, and received the Governor’s Award for Creative Achievement in the Arts in 2009.

Another Day in Key West

by Jack Ridl

Our houseboat is a little houseboat.
Some here are two stories, three

bedrooms, a roof-top patio garden,
the view taking the eye across

the bight out over the cypress
and onto the Gulf where the tarpon

slow dance and the fishing boats
settle in, lines tossed or dropped.

Those on vacation can rent a charter
and hope to take home a photograph

of their catch, the tough scaled fish,
having fought and given in, now hanging

alongside the smiles. Today again
the clouds will pass over us,

the sun will bring sliding light
across the water, time will bring

its illusion to carve its way
into our ephemeral cells,

and we will sit again on our deck,
the wind chime alchemizing the breeze.

Jack Ridl’s most recent poetry collection, Practicing to Walk Like a Heron, received the Gold Medal from Indie/Foreword Reviews. Broken Symmetry won the best collection award from The Society of Midland Authors. Losing Season was named one of the 10 best sports books of the year. His joy, too, he says, is that more than 85 of his students are now publishing. Two years ago, two of them won major first book awards.

 

Names of Old Teammates

by Robert Brickhouse

Spike
ran our rival’s T-plays
on the scout team
with such joy
the coaches put him in the real game
to baffle and wreak havoc.

Moose
hitchhiked to school with no breakfast
no braggadocio, anchored
both sides of the line, retired
a multi-millionaire.

Willy
wore thick glasses with a head band,
wasn’t fast or strong,
guided us up and down the court
with calm precision.

Rags
had a gentle heart, a twisted
smile if he liked you,
sharp elbows if he didn’t and
a fo’-barrel fifty-fo’ Ford.

Bokey
could barely see
over the middle he backed. Any
runner who got that far
never knew what hit him.

Bugsy
saved my ass one night
when I walked alone through his part of town.
Challenged to a fight by a dimwit in a beater,
I said “you know Bugsy?”
He said “any friend of Bugsy’s is a friend of mine.”

Bull
led the state in sacks and held the shotput record.
He’d lock his hands behind his head
at the end of every wind sprint,
strut around to catch his breath and teach us
how good it was to be alive.

Robert Brickhouse, a multi-sport benchwarmer in his youth, has worked as a newspaper reporter and writer for university publications in Virginia. His poems and short stories have appeared in many magazines, among them the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Southern Poetry Review, Poet Lore, the Texas Review, Atlanta Review, Pleiades, and Light Quarterly. “Names of Old Teammates” first appeared in the American Journal of Poetry.

Local Rules

by Andrea Dejean

In the French overseas département of French Guiana, located north of Brazil, we play golf on a course carved out of the Amazon rainforest. Perhaps not unlike courses in other “wild” areas, we have a long list of local rules.

You get a free drop if your ball lands on a red ant nest or close enough that you can’t properly take up your stance without getting bitten; if a monkey moves your ball or steals it, you can replace it (no penalty); grounding your club in a hazard is acceptable only if you are assuring yourself that there are no snakes or in the event that the resident caiman emerges from the water hazard on #5. Back-ups are possible between holes #6 and #7 because the wasps nesting there tend to attack for no reason — and, no, you don’t have to be close. You can almost always place your ball, clean it, or move it — especially on the greens where tunnelling insects wreak havoc on putting lines. The giant anteater on #10 is not aggressive, but don’t get too close or it will wrap you in a suffocating bear hug. If you make a ‘pit-stop’ in the bathroom before teeing off on #13, remember to check that no hairy, urticating spider is snuggled up in the toilet paper tube. Dogs are allowed on the course, but a female puma has been seen teaching her young to hunt along fairway #18, so it’s probably best leave your pup at home.

Tournament play is almost never called due to rain, no matter how torrential, especially because electrical storms are extremely rare. If, however, you cannot find relief from standing water in the middle of the fairway, you can tee up your ball. If you cannot find your ball in the middle of the fairway because it has plunged deeply into the humid earth, you can drop a ball in the closest approximate area — which is not always as easy as you might think because the first ball rarely leaves a trace. On the contrary, during the dry season when much of the course turns to hard pack, you can place your ball on grass as long as you do not move it closer to the pin and as long as you can find some grass. Seasoned players will advise you to avoid the tufts that resist the drought. Clubheads have a tendency to get stuck behind them and the ball usually squirts out any which way, but not generally the way you intended.

You are also advised to resist the temptation to try to fly your ball up and over any of the oil palms on the course at the risk of finding it perched in the fronds (especially on #8) or nestled out of sight behind the protective shell covering the pendulous strings of seeds on two ‘maripa’ palms on #11. Luckily, as the seeds ripen, the shell slowly detaches itself and falls and you can get your ball back — but it might take a week or so. These palms pose another, improbable threat. Several years ago a friend “ker-plunked” her tee-shot into the foot of one of the sock-like weaverbird nests hanging from one of the palms on that same hole.

So, it’s funny that when you are playing on a manicured course in some other part of the world and stopping yourself midway as you bend down to place your ball quite unnecessarily because the ball is sitting on a perfect lie or topping a second shot on lushly carpeted fairways because the thought of taking a divot breaks your heart or five-putting on greens smooth as billiard tables how much you’ll miss this place. You’ll miss the golden quality of the light as the sun sets and the zany, bouncing flight of the toucan overhead, the sound of laughter and conversation as members share cold beer and stories in the open-air clubhouse and how the mangoes that fall onto the tee-box on the third hole make the sweetest jam.

Perhaps the most important local rule, here and elsewhere, and totally contrary to what every instructor has ever told you is: do lift your head. Lift your head, look around, take it all in and realise what a privilege it is to be standing where you are.

The Association de Golf de l’Anse in Kourou, French Guiana, celebrated 20 years of existence in 2015 and is managed entirely by volunteers.

Andrea Dejean is the translator of a book on biodiversity and has published her own poetry and creative fiction and nonfiction in both independent and university-affiliated literary journals. A native of Michigan, she is now a permanent resident of France.