Non-fan finds compelling prose, poetry about sports

I'm not a big sports fan (though I'm rooting for the Cards in the Series), but I found compelling work about boxing and baseball in the latest issue of Apalachee Review. My reviews of that magazine and Blueline were posted yesterday here at New Pages. You'll also find reviews of a number of other lit magazines there. Check 'em out.

2011 Temenos is out from CMU

Temenos, the lit magazine at Central Michigan University, has published my poem "Boys" in a slightly different version in its 2011 issue, which arrived in my mailbox today. One of my favorite Michiganders, Danny Rendleman, has a poem in the same issue. Check it out.


BOYS

In the spare room of Odd Fellows Hall
we practiced half-hitches and square knots,
recited the words we’d memorized
then spilled out the door
to what we came for --
a dark vacant lot without rules
where we piled on any boy who had the ball,
dragged him hard to newly frosted ground,
hoping for blood.
Feral under an ivory moon, we did
what injury we could at 80 pounds
with narrow shoulders, skinny
arms and legs,
while the Scoutmaster and assistant
sat on folding chairs under a bare bulb, lit up,
and traded stories in a quiet drawl
that drifted with tobacco smoke across the carnage
like the certainty we were bred with,
that we lived in the best little place on earth
and everything was fine.

That Obituary Summer

This is the first paragraph of my short story, "That Obituary Summer," published in the current issue of Red Fez. The full story is here.

I’D GO IN AT 4:00, climbing stairs past a landing where linotypes clattered behind frosted glass. Another flight took me to the newsroom. I always ate beforehand at a grill down the street, open-faced hamburger and mashed potatoes with dark gravy. I could have taken a supper break, but I ate early because I didn’t want to miss anything. The two-star went to press at midnight. After the papers came up, we sent out for chili mac and beer. Sometimes we’d replate for a late-breaking story, but usually we played whiffle ball among the desks until 1 a.m. Then McCarthy, the night city editor, phoned the foreman to chisel a star off the plate, and the press in the basement rumbled back to life with the one-star. Staffers with families went home, and the rest of us bar-crawled the dark, humid city. It was my first newspaper job, and I wrote almost nothing but little stories about death.