Vol. 1, No. 1: The First Pitch

I felt much better after I tossed my hat into the kitchen bin. For extra clarity, I gathered all of the championship gear in a box, sealed the box shut, and buried the box under our ginkgo tree. I used the “bad” shovel with a broken handle. A vintage jersey with my last name, which I share with a famous player, also went into the box. It’s my favorite version of the team’s jersey and a gift from my brother. I wonder how long it will last.

I was at the library pretending to read a book by Ambrose Bierce when I sneezed a sneeze that threw my head back. I felt a warm hand on my shoulder. A man with sunglasses and a stylish haircut smirked at me. “I think you have what it takes to beat Jerry,” the man said. “You do?” I said. Jerry was the Sneeze King. I doubted the stylish man, but his flattery was nice, and I hadn’t been touched in years. So the stylish man trained me. I learned how to inhale through the corners of my eyes to build my capacity for air. I forced myself to lose my taste for cheese. I mastered transcendental meditation. And when I went to Meigs County, Ohio, for the sneezing world championship, I took home the gold handkerchief. I was the Sneeze King. But three months later, Jerry jumped in front of a subway train. His children blamed me. I couldn’t sleep. “I can’t do it anymore,” I told the stylish man over the phone. “Can’t or won’t?” he said but I’d already hung up. Now I ignore the itch in my nose at the library. It is my disgrace, and my crown.

I am The Flying Nun from the TV show, soaring way up in the clouds with my arms held out stiffly and headpiece flapping like a seagull. My child’s face is superimposed over that of the actress Sally Field. I am not going anywhere. I am just flying in place. I have the dream so often that it is my reality and at age seven I begin trying to fly, jumping off an old toy box my family uses to store our many shoes. I am genuinely surprised when I don’t rise. The box must be too low to take off from. Plus, it’s indoors. I try jumping from the apple tree outside my bedroom window. My father shouts at me through the screen to stop. Although I still don’t fly, my legs grow muscled from climbing and jumping. The dream continues, sustaining me through third grade, when I’m bullied and would give anything to fly away. I pursue its same feeling of euphoria when I’m awake. At 10 I begin jumping from the roof, aiming for the swimming pool 12 feet below in case I don’t fly, which I don’t. I do become a very good diver, though. One day my parents come home early from work and see me. My father yells. The next day my mother begins entering me in competitions. We travel all over the Western U.S. and then the nation, where I come to know other swimmers better than my school classmates. The dream stays the same in all of the hotels with twin beds and nubby bath towels. My heavy cloth habit is no hindrance; I just keep flying in place and smiling. By 18 I am launching from the highest diving boards across the country. A sporting goods company names a white string bikini that is unsuitable for swimming competitions after me. My younger sister buys three. I spend every waking hour diving like a cormorant into the water. I often have athlete’s foot. I can’t spare any time for boys and sex. I’ve made a vow: I will be the best woman diver in the world. I don’t have the dream anymore. One night, as I sleep in the Olympic Village before the games begin, Sally Field comes to me. She is not The Flying Nun. She is just Sally Field. She looks exhausted. She is walking because she is loaded down with dozens of medals on ribbons she wears around her neck and is dragging a trophy as big as a cello. I wake up as unhappy as Sally Field. At my competition the following morning, when my name is called I walk forward. I pull off my swim cap, drawing on the nun’s headpiece I’ve fashioned from several of the dining hall’s starched cloth napkins and safety pins. Climbing the ladder to the board, I pass my mother in the bleachers signaling at me like an air traffic marshal trying to land a plane. I motion her down in a sort of genuflect. Standing at the edge of the diving board, I can see the white wings in my peripheral vision, exactly where they’re meant to be if I’m ever to take off.

Problems With Narratives

The story goes: the players from Dynamo Kiev were shot — wearing their uniforms — for refusing to lose a match to a team of Wehrmacht soldiers during the German occupation of Ukraine. But that never happened. It’s a bedtime story for those swaddled in the blanket of history. They sleep dreaming of crying birds and lovers driving through unnavigable cities. The nonghosts of the nondead — wearing their uniforms — are the only ones fit to compose these dreams.

Ignominy

Nobody could believe that the United States beat England in the 1950 World Cup, in Uruguay. The score was 1-0. The man who scored the goal was a Haitian immigrant named Joe Gaetjens who worked as a dishwasher. Nobody knows what became of him. Possibly, he was murdered by the Tontons Macoute. Galeano misidentifies him as “Larry.”

George Best and Pele in a Limousine to JFK

“I understand Titan but I do not understand Io.”

“Celestial bodies are all liars.”

Non-Normative Value Systems

We the boys who did not win score compete in any sense but nominal decided that we could win in violence. The final score my elbow 2 that kid’s ribs nil.

The Intentions of Algorithms

If you search the website of an English bookseller for Gazza Agonistes, the book-length essay by Ian Hamilton about Paul Gascoigne, the English striker of the 1980s and 90s whose career and life have been mangled by alcoholism and mental illness, the first titles that come up are: Alcohol and Drug Misuse; Clinical Management of the Elderly Patient in Pain; GABA and Sleep; Retinoid and Rexinoid Signaling.

Ibra

The demon-child who hoofs around outside my house loves to ring my doorbell and run away. I always know it’s him because the ringing is scorched. I don’t chase after him any longer, threaten to report him to the authorities or his demon-parents. When I did, he dangled from the gutter and sang his hymns. They were appalling and lovely, and he refused to teach me the words.

My Son and I Watch Panama Score Their First World Cup Goal Ever Against England, in a Pub Off of Tottenham Court Road

Let the doomed and the damned rejoice.

Solitude

Camus, of course, passable goalie in Algeria: “What I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.” Lev Yashin, Russian thaumaturge goalie: “The joy of of seeing Yuri Gagarin flying in space is only superseded by the joy of a good penalty save.” Handke, genocide apologist: “The goalkeeper, who was wearing a bright yellow jersey, stood absolutely still, and the penalty kicker shot the ball into his hands.” The spirit was met by Anubis, who was without his scales. He looked askew and splay-brained. How are you handling this, asked the spirit. Just gotta guess, said Anubis. Make it up on the fly. No instructions, no guidance. Just make it up on the fly. Ready to get on with it?

Determinism

We all want to know how it ends. The contraption careens downhill. There are sparks in the dust cloud. Nobody listens to the sadsack saying we know what’s going to happen all along. His teeth are twenty watt yellow and his posture is wilting. Ask at the fairground sideshow. Or elsewhere. Voices crawl out of their burrows claiming to have information on tomorrow. A boy looks at what he’s done in the toilet for a picture of his life to come. Lake harpies say suspense is a conspiracy and hawk foreknowledge in bunches of six. The newlyweds, delirious from the oceans, trains, and roads, flip on the television in their hotel room. The cup final is on. The championship will be decided by a fairground sideshow the commentator says when the match goes to penalty kicks. She falls asleep under slashes of midday sun. He sits at the edge of the bed. The answer was right in front of us the whole time they each tell their lawyer, some years down the road.

at the 2020 Daytona 500, we watched
a blank screen, inhaled, and waited
after an ambulance cleared the debris
and took him away. Honey, how
do you start this watch?
My fiancé blows out a candle
spilling red wax. It looks
like a knife wound leaking
onto the carpet. Surgically, we
clean the fabric on our knees. A drop
gets on my wooden watch. I take an old
credit card and scrap its face smooth.
Annoyed by its inability to cheat death,
I desperately twist its pin, a soldier
priming a grenade that sounds
like Big Ben ringing in the New Year.
The little hand finally starts ticking. Seconds 
become minutes become hours and my eyes
are glued to its track, watching
the hands chase each other
along their predestined path.

No stories inside the heavy bag pouring its foam intestines all over the floor of the

repurposed warehouse;

no confessions beaten out of it despite being beaten

& beaten. A heavy bag suspended from

the ceiling

never hangs completely still. Untouched for hours, watch it twitch at the end of its chain

after the white,

cylindrical lights no longer buzz & steel gates clang across the entrance. A few boxers walk

home, gloves slung

over their shoulders, discussing slasher films. A few await an illicit delivery, linger out front.

A few drive

to a muddy riverfront & spar bare-knuckle in moonlight.

One boxer, thrown out of his

mother’s & sleeping in his Cutlass,

wakes at midnight, finds a dice game, strikes lucky, rolls a streak of sevens....

Even now,

the story rattles

around my skull as if jacketed in metal: Terence Crawford, boxer, counting twenties, fifties,

hundreds

in the front seat of his Cutlass—then a bullet piercing tinted glass. The rest? Promoters love

to tell it

(sells tickets) & I admit, I tell myself in those weak, tremoring hours, how Terence

Crawford, with a bullet

in his skull, drove himself to the hospital.

Sometimes I repeat it, hammering emphases:

bullet skull drove HIMSELF.

Terence hates retelling it, resists the redemption narrative, the slick epiphany. He makes a

million off

a fight these days, goes home to Omaha, goes fishing.... Slow that shell’s rotations to half

the speed of snowfall,

you’ll trace its path around, & not through, cortex & tissue. Ballistics offers a story, but no

solution.

No song in the retelling, only wind through the bones of an urban legend. Then the skeleton

goes missing.

~

What I loved about Crawford, as I leaned over the balcony at Madison Square & watched

him clobber

a Dominican ex-Olympian senseless, was his lack of panic, his laconic lean-back in the

pocket, pawing,

parrying like he had eternity in the Garden, no rush to action. Then, the sudden southpaw

shift in stance,

the strike, the sting, the straight right hand. What I loved was his sadist’s streak & quiet

arrogance.

His way of saying fuck y’all with a glance. Blood on black gloves. Steadily dismantling the

threat.

~

As he blasted through red lights en route to the Omaha ER, what laundry from that Cutlass’

leather interior

staunched his rushing blood—a grey, sweat-hardened wifebeater or sock, an improvised,

tangled tourniquet

of handwraps? He’s been shot at eight times since, his estimate.

A chorus: these streets

are—this sport is—war

& what’s war resolved? Nothing, yuh?

A chorus:—with Cutlass, laundry, & blood—for

Terence Crawford’s

sniper-steady dice & uppercuts, hitting lucky sevens & solar plexuses as if he’ll never miss,

has never missed before.

I went to the Kentucky Derby and did not see a single fucking horse the entire time I was there. I spent Derby day huddling under a Maker's Mark promotional tent with my future roommate and about ninety-nine other strangers in a vain attempt to seek shelter from a driving rain that started about five minutes after we got there and continued until right after we'd gone too far from the track to turn around and head back. I didn't see any horses, but I did see a few members of the Westboro Baptist Church or maybe a different far-right evangelical congregation; it doesn't matter, really. They called me a fornicator.

A scheissgutzeit is a word I made up that combines the German words for shit, good, and time. A scheissgutzeit is an experience that is, by any objective measure, unpleasant, and yet one remembers it fondly. A scheissgutzeit cannot be beneficial or edifying in any significant way. Running a marathon is not a scheissgutzeit. Being locked in a room with a bunch of heavily intoxicated young men about your own age and not allowed out until someone has broken a bone is not a scheissgutzeit either; the term for that is hazing. A scheissgutzeit is just a thing that happens sometimes, somewhere at the intersection of the sunk-cost fallacy and a day that somehow manages to be frustrating enough that it horseshoes back around toward decent.

A horse named Social Inclusion ran in that year's race, and I was convinced it was going to be put down on the racetrack. People ought to be more responsible for how they name their horses, instead of risking life's love of unsubtle symbolism. Although, if it were up to me, at least one horse every year should be required to have a name like “I Drink Mint Juleps on the Graves of the Working Class.”

Either way, even if Social Inclusion was put down on the track or if someone had pointed out that A Horse Named Social Inclusion sounded like the title of a lesser known Tennessee Williams play, I was in no position to notice. I'd envisioned that attending the Kentucky Derby meant sitting in the stands and calmly watching thoroughbreds go tearing around the oval while I passed around drinks to my friends and possibly even strange women in outrageously large hats. Tom Brady got to do that. I went to the infield.

According to the Churchill Downs guide, the infield had a “music festival” atmosphere. That meant people got drunk enough to piss on the ground. They might not have understood the risk that an A-lister might spot them through a pair of opera glasses, which they would slowly lower to the ground before saying, to nobody in particular, “I do declare.”

Or maybe the people pissing on the ground had thought about this and decided it was still preferable to braving the gauntlet of evangelicals that congregated around the line for the toilets. They may have done this out of a desire to exploit a captive audience, or possibly out of a misplaced conviction about what it meant to suffer for their faith.

One of them held a megaphone and took time to harangue each person that came by. He'd spot a wrinkled betting ticked in someone's hand and chastise them for being an inveterate gambler. He derided the doomed alcoholics tossing away their plastic cups. Finally, he got to me.

I took him a moment, because I did not carry any of the outward signs of participating in the usual vices that someone can participate in during a horse race. I wasn't actually old enough to drink, and I hadn't placed any bets. I expected him to skip me and move on, but he must have enjoyed probing my soul for secret iniquities. The megaphone crackled as he pressed down the button.

“You are a fornicator!”

I'd never heard someone caress a word before when they spoke, but that was what this guy was doing with “fornicator.”

“And let me tell you, you don't fornicate on accident. You don't fall over and say 'whoops, I fornicated.'”

I'd been called a lot of things in my life, but “intentional fornicator” was never one of them. Nobody before or since has looked at me and thought “I'll bet that guy has a ton of sex.” I'd never understood the appeal of fundamentalist cults, but that was probably the closest I got to being recruited. In a crowd of drunk college students and middle aged gamblers, I was the fornicator—a true Missouri ten.

My roommate tapped me on the shoulder. “I'm freezing my ass off here.”

His horses hadn't done well. Contrary to the advice of the betting guide, the favored horses were still better at running on mud than the underdogs.

Pheidippides, rise!
                                a new cadence
                                                                                the void is not something created
                                                                male elites

                                        dreading the void
avoid coming to and entering it
                                2,500-year-old man
                                                                if the heart explodes, then
                                                                                                          tear, tug, wail, roar, cry,
I, I, I, I, I,
                writing motion as feminist space
                                                                a lot of people do not care
                                                                                                          I might not either
                                                            refusing the syntactic, mythic,

                        and thematic models
verse that grants itself agency
                                                any long-drawn out activity is called
                                                                                                        a marathon, colloquially
                                                                it is eerie to know yourself
                                for instance, to watch
your protein synthesize in a way
                                                    greater than its breakdown
                                                                                                did Pheidippides die with grace
                                                        is the question I ask but
                history avoids the answer
I put on my sports bra
                                this is a moment that does not warrant critical attention
                                                                                                                it was the year 490 BC
a lot of battle
                        it is hard not to have a preconceived sense of
                                                                                                my limitations
                                                                                                                where endurance begins
                                                                                                and never ends
                                my standard for new poems are rigorous
I long for a new cadence
                                woman constructing linguistic map
                                                                                        a route to
                                                                                                        a precise moment in history
                                                                           a precise moment
                                                in a personal life
                some say delusional
that goes beyond language
                                                into a subtle dimension
                                                                                        of impractical mysticism
                                                                                                                                nobody is
                                                                                        the protagonist though many
                                        believe they are
                the lyrical I
in what becomes for the poet a signature poetic gesture,
                                                                                                I long for meaningful communication
                              it was 150 miles from Athens to Sparta
reiterated in lines
                                that traverse out existential loneliness
                                                                                              Pheidippides did it in 48 hours

                                        nineteen minutes per mile pace
embodied self-reliance
                                        hard-wrought transformation
                                                                                        of isolation into solitude
                                                                                                                                I really love being
                                                                                alone for most hours of the day
thinking and repeating depictions of a sustained moment of consciousness
                                                                                                                        the modern marathon
                                                                race to commemorate something
   the way poems stir women and women
the messenger was killed
                                        the heart fails
                                                                under extreme duress
                                                                                                   body language
                                                                                                                            ironically necessary
                                                                                                he left at daybreak
                                I make sure everyone is gone by daybreak
the poet rewrites versions of the same poem,
                                                                        fairly flat, fertile country
                                                                                                             skeletal forms
thence along the river
                                   I see it as a poem I had been building towards,
                                                                                                              a summation
                                                                             stony paths followed
in some respects, this is my most personal poem to date
                                                                                        the remainder of the run is uncertain
                                        did he even once stop for water
            without hydration
the body cannot regulate its temperatures
                                                                    the heart works harder to pump blood
                                                                                                                                in a search
                                                                            for language to register complex
                                                                emotion
it is not uncommon for long distance runners to collapse
                                                                                          and die after an arduous run
                                                                                                                                      what dictates
                                                                                that women must see each other
                        as competitors the speaker refuses
Pheidippdes, speak!
                                  he said so many things
                                                                        I refuse to adhere
                                                                                                      to traditional adages that split
                                                                women from each other
                                a slip of the tongue
joy to you, we’ve won
                                   the right to become a metaphor
                                                                                      for institutionalized fear
                                                                                                                             joy to you

                                        if the poem takes striking and semantic syntactic risks
                      joy we win
compromising my craft
                                     we win
                                                 meticulously selecting each word
                                                                                                       hail we are the winners
                                               a language and form stripped bare
             you play the game to
lose your balance
                             fail to keep duration
                                                             check your heart rate you just might not be alive

Bowling is not a warlike game. Nothing strikes back. You get ten tries to do it again. The pins do not seek retribution. I’m in the Zone today—feel it in my Hands, my Heart. The world can’t enter. Today is another day. I drink my Rolling Rock on a vinyl divan. I watch the cracked, red explosions of the lights above each lane. The dulled, beaten pins below waiting to be knocked again. Who is anyone to feel safe?  

Jimmy Barlow got laid off last Tuesday. He still comes to Leagues. In his chewed-on shoes. He says Jesus did this. It’s 7 o’clock on a Tuesday night here and the blue collars are chatting up theories, possible and impossible conspiracies. I know the Truth. This wasn’t an accident. We’re all meant for one Impossible Day. Even Winners don’t get to sleep. I’m in the Zone. It’s preordained. The world can’t be saved every day.  

The State must be abolished. I take the ball in my hands, pretend it’s the skull of virtue I’m tossing at each  Industry that continues our Suffering. What’s the trick? Conviction. In. Beliefs. How could I not be winning now? Who couldn’t love this son-of-a-bitch throwing meteors at the ten moons of Krypton? Know thyself. 

At the bar they have two TVs. One is playing coverage of today’s events. Infinite planes disappearing into infinite towers. The other is playing a rerun of Married With Children. In one way or another, aren’t we all married with children? Don’t we all have to protect what’s ours? Isn’t everything that happens every day to us ours?  

Except this Strike. I can’t share it with anybody. It’s mine. Harry says I’m on a roll. I know he’s jealous. He  drinks his beer and will go home to a three-legged dog and a wife who thinks Uncle Sam is Jesus. I can’t teach him the Infinite Spin Technique. I can’t undo his Trauma. What would I do if I wasn’t here?  

Probably dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex. Probably putting a brick through a cop’s windshield. I  could be siphoning back the money from the great terrorist banks that have perpetuated infinite falling towers since the dawn of mollusks. But I have a bowling ball in my hands and I’m in the Zone. Who will remember this?  

One Strike leads to another Strike. And another. And so on. Until the Universe is made. I read it in a book.  We have no business being here otherwise. I can feel the secrets of the world inside me. The smell of nachos, hot dogs, stale floor in the air. Terrorism is just another form of Capitalism. We go home with ravaged bodies, belly aches, heads throbbing, and climb back into the darkness to live again.  

I have a wife at home I love. Who loves me. When I’m finished here, I’ll go home and lie next to her, and  while she sleeps, I’ll whisper into her ear The things I know for certain in this world are LBJ killed Kennedy and I  love you. I bowl another Strike for posterity. Harry, sweaty drunk, laughs and says I’m perfect like he  doesn’t want to believe what his eyes are seeing. Of course. It happens all the time. Someone somewhere  screams. 

I’m in the Zone. I grew up wet, alone, confused in a cave—taught myself Greek, String Theory, Radical  Compassion, Sonatas in A-minor, Communism—I can whistle perfectly “Tutti Frutti”—I can bowl a  Perfect Game. I know my name and that’s all that matters. What stops me from stopping the ills of the world, you ask? I have to go to work. The world turns on without me. Somebody dies. Another person dies. Infinite buildings fall. Somebody stop me from being Perfect! Reverse the course of History! But there  is nobody who will come to slap the bowling ball from my hands. Time Travel doesn’t exist. Except for  Winners. I’m not a Winner though… 

I’m just another guy who’s having another day. I’m alive. We’re always in the dust of the dustup, always in the fog of the forests, always in the leap of the frog—a philosopher writing in Chinese said that. I make  sense of my continual survival by standing alone on a mountain, on just another day, like any other day.  Could’ve been tomorrow for all I know. Strike! The world can crumble around you and your friends and  family might leave you and you might find an orphan beaten to death in the middle of Grand Central  Station, but today is still just another day. Never forget… You do something once in your life and they  throw roses at your feet. That’s all it takes. One time. It’s perfect.