What makes a piece of writing an Under Review piece? 

I asked myself this before I started reviewing submissions for this issue. It was meant to be a sort of recalibration of my inner scale and a focused pause before cannonballing into the always fast, sometimes choppy waters of issue production. I should tell you that we have no formal rubric for evaluating the work we receive,  no consistent scoring system or formula. I like it that way; I think  Meghan and Terry do, too.

No throngs of spectators lining the streets. 

No streets!  Gravel driveway to gravel road 

and a single participant, sober as a farm boy can be, 

in tenuous balance over rutted pasture, 

The surfer sits, straddling the board, slowly moving up and down with the swell as mountains of green water shift beneath in the unfathomed deep.

Even if it grieved you to see us—

spindly, meager,

each joint bigger than its limbs.

I love the purple of a roller rink

from the future

The hydrants are open—

roll the windows up

and approach the spray,

clear that all joy-filled screams

would be drowned out by the

Water. Pelting the windows.

For Brook Lopez, Center

Up here in stadium section 207, you are ordinary 

seven-foot man mountain. L.A. native slope 

of bluff ribbed rock. 

I remember you as God in a fold-out lawn chair.

Clipboard, stopwatch, lemonade at your elbow. 

Halfway through an alley 

smoke & a classic third

quarter Knicks collapse,

the kid upstairs who shit 

Domestique

French, noun. 

Servant. Help.     

When I first saw Tai Tzu Ying on the badminton court, I couldn’t tell if I wanted to be her, or wanted to be with her. Is this what KT Tunstall meant when she sang about Patti Smith? 

Despite stemming from one’s shortcomings, 

backed up sliders symbolize baseball’s grace. 

Baseball is a failure-centric sport, you see; displayed by 

backed up sliders aspiring to be standard sliders. Standard sliders are pitches

The Seattle Mariners are exceptionally bad. Spectacularly bad. Supernaturally bad. They are one of six MLB teams never to win the World Series and the only team to never even play in it.

We were just kids. Ball players. Hoopers. Most of us couldn’t point out Argentina on a map. Was it in Southern Europe or South America? I knew it was one of the two, but it was difficult to remember which. 

1) Do not buy eggs at Whole Foods. Eggs are cheapest at Target, but the quality of produce is much better at Whole Foods. They also have good ready-made dinners when you are too lazy to cook like eight salmon rolls for $10.99.

I lift the first Atlas stone, the lightest, place it easily on the platform. I can’t hear the arena crowd: I can only see their hands clap, their mouths move.

The echoing cacophony of the seventh inning pounded through the tunnel. He stood with his daughter mere feet from the field, separated only by the dugout and short concrete steps. He’d maneuvered his back to the tunnel wall, eliminating some of his rising anxiety in the confined space.

Nichols brought the ball up the court with controlled urgency. With twenty-three seconds left and his Roadrunners down one, it was go-time, but not panic-time. In moments like this—in the clutch—the game slowed down for Nichols.

She didn’t care about basketball, but she loved it when Mr. Dyson pulled the TV cart into the classroom and put the game on.