I’m writing this letter in the same place I do most of my writing, beside my favorite window in my home looking out onto our snowy little corner in Minneapolis. About 500 feet away from where I sit my yoga instructor guards the door of a beloved neighborhood taco spot. Nothing about this feels normal and nothing about this feels okay.

I heard girl-chatter emerge behind me
and saw Linda, the blond cheerleader with
those agate-brown eyes, split off from her
friend and smile my way as she angled down

Black bodies dead sprinting

up and down the asphalt

joins with lovely cadence

808 of ball bounce

producing perfect tune

It’s the french press, icy sunrise,

6AM alarm still vibrating my teeth.

It’s epoxy fumes, see gloves and boots

as old gods gossiping by the sink.

Gamblers ignite more frenzy than players,

cigarette smoke disfigures the sky,

old men living among the relics

like prosperous fish, take hapless prey,

(not like the “entertainment venue”

that the game and frontón are part of today).

Frozen in the middle of the trail,
blocking the end of my summer morning run
was a fox, holding in its mouth a rabbit—

Your slap shot is anthrax. 
Your passes are filthy.
Your skating is swift and fluid. 
Sabres fans say your name 
as if in prayer—

It’s a long shot.  From shore the pond’s inlet

looked like open water, which would never

I’m forgiving the money I loaned you,                                 
my lifelong homie. Late on your alimony,
$2,400 in the hole, you’re poised to forfeit 

Yeah,
here we go

Englishmen planted willow trees in Kashmir
a hobbyist’s investment of fine grains.
The life of a tree is not ornamental beneath the surface.

When I was a teenager, I got dropped on my head by my skating partner. The wail of the siren was muffled from inside the ambulance. Paramedics pelted me with questions I may or may not have answered correctly. My body and my brain were still in shock.

I’ve heard that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But figure skating happens in curves and with edges sometimes called “lobes” shaped just like ears. An aerial view of a session would reveal an overlapping collection of arcs, swirls, curlicues, and loop-de-loops double-backing on themselves.

Playing for the New York City Little League championship was a big deal for College Point, my part of Queens. Not much else to cheer about in the summer in 1966. Vietnam protests, transit strike, Yankees mired in last place. The hapless Mets! The Civil Rights Act had passed two years earlier but redlining was still legal.

The rink sounds older at night. Compressors hum behind the boards; edges hiss in tight half-moons; a stick taps twice—code, courtesy, warning. In Kladno, under low municipal light, number 68 leans over a defensive zone draw on the right dot.

May 26th, 2024, my father and I scroll mindlessly on TV and find a Cubs-Cardinals game on ESPN, teams neither of us care about but are broadcast here in the Chicago area. Watching is an easy way to while away the hour between now and dinner. Rain rages outside, and so Wrigley Field is rained out too.

The day Zach asked if we could listen to the song “Perfect Timing” started like most days in my third-hour Grade 11 English class.

“Shut up, Zach,” Caleb barked. “Shut up about ‘Perfect Timing’”.

07:22

The nectar glow of sunrise infuses the horizon as the Jeep moves along the track, a plume of dust in its wake. Amani whistles in the driver’s seat. He has just run a new personal best. With four weeks left til Chicago it is exactly where he wants to be, tossing out records, making new ones.

The alumni arrived on Friday. They were everywhere at once, swarming the quad, pointing at the old-time buildings and bike paths like, would you look at that! In the two hours it took for football practice to finish (a packed schedule with the hitting drills, sled drives, and no-contact scrimmage), our campus was transformed into a refugee zone. Where my friends had walked before, now strangers. T

"Hey, hero, you trying out for football?" Frank's father, Joe Merino, calls out from the TV room. 

Joe must be kidding. Frank is only 12. He's also heavy, fat, what adults call a Husky. Mighty big. No wonder. Cooking's his favorite hobby. In fact, he's now busy frying burgers, as he usually does when Mom and Dad come back from weekly shopping at the A & P.

My dad was a great man. Let’s start with that. But this story is about my Uncle Ted. I had some of his DNA, sure, but the gene we shared completely was baseball.

My father did not like the game. There was no baseball in Krakow.

Wearing an unbound, steely-eyed, self-possessed look as the blood red sun starts to set before him beneath the last stretch of late July Ohio cornfields in the distance—after all, lest we ever forget, this is America, “Land of the Free, Home of the Brave”—Billy Ventura stands poised in his helmet, elbow and knee pads, chin up, chest out, shoulders thrown back, his right foot stamped down upon the tail of his skateboard, its wheels hanging over the vertical lip of his ten foot halfpipe as if in breathless anticipation.