THE YEAR I QUIT BASEBALL

April 11, 2022 David James Brock

FROM APRIL 2020 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

This is me in 1995

High Park 5 - Glace Bay 1
August 19, 1995

Brick houses on Glenlake go poison. They’ll be dirt cheap
next year. My relocation will be handwritten in pencil,

in a still private future. An agony of hard choices are made
this summer. Wiring still on spools, under rain delay &

lookout. Shrink down the region to locate its brag & pride.
Our Little League locals win the country, & everyone knows

that Arauz is lights out, Chmielewski could go pro. They’re
twelve, & the best hasn’t eaten their dust. The year I quit

baseball, I’m deranged. A simple machine. A wedge. An inner
voice introduces itself to me, & the voice keeps changing. I spit

tobacco in glass bottles during grade ten math, see fake
sex on computers, & drive my dad’s Pontiac. If things

grow bad someday, where will we live? When can we go?
Will we follow High Park down to Williamsport?

There are sweet sounds flying out from radios hidden
in our black oak savannah: metronomes of basketballs

off palm to asphalt. Bike bells. A barred owl mourning
catalpa hit by lightning. Phrenology, crystal ball, the

seat you pick on the Greyhound south: each forecasts
a homeostatic prospect. The year I quit baseball, the rules

mutate. Possibilities self-replicate. A new species of comet
flies on a microscope slide. The sakura bleach in autumn.

Tomorrow’s billionaires shoplift their first PlayStations.
I waste time when I study the rosters. I study the rosters.

This is the era of boom, when cities are harmed or about
to get a franchise. Why does it feel so good to lose now?

Science fiction is dead. Feel the rocket’s song & live forever.
Hide from our growth on a trip down to Williamsport.

High Park Canadian Little League champions 1995

Cut a decade in half. Picture it like mitts cupping Earth
around the poles, twisting. There’s relief in the pop of the

pickle jar’s lid. When the avocado comes clean off the pit.
When Visca’s fastball finds the corner. When the game is over.

Refresh the planet. Hear new percussion in the plates. Divide
us. We’ll reunite under empathetic night skies. The year

I quit baseball, Hatillo San Cristobal sleeps where Bolivia
once was. A helium balloon floats Seoul to Saskatchewan,

guided by the stars in Southern Cross. A sheep is cloned.
Lesser earthquakes expose our bedrock: it’s pink slime.

& it’s status quo at the Equator if you’re off a fault line.
At fifteen, I wanna live on Mir post-Big ShiftTM when some

prayers are finally answered. Trip of a lifetime. Some of us
in retrograde, & others on a trip north to Williamsport.

We connect through loss. Not everything is grief. The year
I quit baseball, I place escape plans in a cleat box with a

ticket stub to Waterworld: this’ll be currency if the curveball
hangs. There are no wrinkles on tomorrow. We’ll grow into

jobs for an obvious future (machine masseuse, good lung,
toaster therapist). Give us wings by the millennium. When

baseball poems are erased of syrup, then masked with salt
& lemon. Where engines perfect calls & lift planets over fences.

The chemical brawls will cancel all global travel. We’ll redraw
rules with chalk bodies of prehistoric crawlers. Load U-Hauls

for exodus. I’ll pack my ball glove, & it’ll be okay if anticipation
smokes outcomes: first six of Blue, mosh-pits, & wedding days.

What a run, boys. We’re hard-wired for the joys of a semifinal.
The best comes, is gone, a world of it lodged down in Williamsport.