Vol. 1, No. 2: Line Drives & Bloop Hits photo

Curt Flood in CopenhagenRyan Harper

In a nation of water
drawing on edges
the outfielder stands—artist

touching up his piece, latest
young man to deign east
his private gift, unto death.

Difficulties everywhere
he mixes media:
charcoal, watercolor, new

events on paper, guided
but bleeding beyond
his strokes—graded wash, windblown

fly, runner picked off, cutoff
misaligned, stumped streak:
imprecise events, arrayed 

before him, every agent
free—there is the rub
of mixed media unbound, 

sombré, cardinal to crimson 
and back, unresolved.
Curt Flood knows this is his piece—

the soft drafts in Denmark—
shaping at remove
his undiscovered country, 

moving, becoming himself
the movement, the tracked 
fly, the cutoff man turning. 

Water like despair holding
with its promises
its danger, he follows through.

Ryan Harper is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Colby College’s Department of Religious Studies. He is the author of My Beloved Had a Vineyard, winner of the 2017 Prize Americana in poetry (Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2018). Some of his recent poems and essays have appeared in Change Seven, Tahoma Literary Review, Wild Roof Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere. A resident of New York City and Waterville, Maine, Ryan is the creative arts editor of American Religion Journal.