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

What Happens NextJ. David

The lilacs left me that year
and none of it mattered.

I’d get high before breakfast
and drink in the afternoons.

Jake moved to Pittsburgh
and would drive on weekends

to watch Cleveland baseball
from the bleachers with me. 

We drank overpriced beer
and screamed the names

of players the teams had
traded or cut. It was only funny 

because neither of us were bitter. 
Teams paid players to be

replaceable, to pack their lives
into suitcases and trade states.

We watched, game after game,
collecting new names to shout

into the diamond. And in
the parking lot, after Jake had 

started his long drive home,
I shout your name 

at empty cars. One lights up,
drives off into the night. 

J. David is a Ukrainian-American writer and laboratory geneticist from Cleveland, Ohio. They work in a lab researching diabetes and rare pediatric endocrine disorders. Their debut chapbook Hibernation Highway was released in 2020 from Madhouse Press. A Baldwin House fellow, Literary Cleveland Inkubator fellow, and member of the Sad Kid's Superhero Collective, they serve as Editor-in-Chief for Flypaper Magazine ​and chief poetry critic for the Cleveland Review of Books. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Harvard Review, Colorado Review, Salt Hill, Redivider, The Rumpus, Passages North, The Journal, Muzzle Magazine, and others.