Dear Readers,

I miss the crowds. I miss the bars. I miss high-fiving. I don’t want to lose focus on the much bigger concerns facing our society right now…

The crook & knot of hand, how you reached out & spun yourself…

I blushed like I had already been hit when she slipped that cotton baton
into my pocket between bells, though why was I ashamed our bodies emptied and refilled

these legs are long legs.
they need room to
stretch out in…

Mother reached the daily recommended steps often.
Many evenings, running to the ice cream truck offered the urgency of a race to be beat,
"Alert the driver, be careful, and get their attention!"

Okay—now that the cosmic
game show is over and
no one kept score we
mistook the sunrise for a…

Sean Avery follows his weakass
shot into Brodeur, snows him,
that bastard,

but there are reasons I ever deny or pull back the dresses and drapery in the closet. It is the way your mouth moves each time you call me your son…

I call Michael Jordan the Diana Taurasi of basketball.

Legend has it Ken Griffey Jr. hit a home run so far it flew

Hardwood
Players line up as kids flood the risen floor like confetti. Lenses sprout in the teeth of embrace, illuminating sweat stuck to foreheads, a tide of surface fish hiding in sunlight…

H-O-R-S-E
From behind the hoopsteetering in uncertain spring wind, held firm by sand bags leaking hourglass steady, shooters factor air, arcade style swaying…

Sometimes you dangle
the puck, pull it
back, and a tank-
shouldered giant
with a hooked stick
pins his eyes
like a boutonniere
on a prom lapel
and plants his gloves
in your sternum.

At first, there was nothing
here. At least, that’s what we say
about a place before the building begins.

Two black boys in sport goggles
and highlighter green gym shorts
play the display piano and talk

I don’t know how to write about Pearl Jam other than to begin with the Maxell UR 60 tape I stole from my friend in the seventh grade…

Soccer, the most popular team sport in the world, is a fast-paced game with few breaks in the action…

I don’t have the fire, Coach B tells me. I forget the score of the tennis match, I never bobby-pin my bangs back to see the ball, I sound like a church kid reciting liturgy during group chants…

Dad doesn’t believe me when I say I remember. It’s over 40 years later. “Who else was there?” he asks…

July 11th, 2016 ~ Stage 16 of 21: Moirans-en-Montagne to Berne.
“It feels like we’ve been swallowed by Moby Dick!” I screamed through the ear-splitting din of the ferocious Swiss tunnel.

After practice, the twelve-man Catholic Youth Organization team huddled around the coach for an announcement. I prepared to hear the news about the next game and what time we would have to arrive…

Jorge’s legs pumped furiously while he imagined the possibilities of a life with Gabrielle…

By now the Meat Grinder has probably been banned, tossed on the dogpile of high school football history as a cruel and unproductive anachronism, a relic of the better-forgotten days when “walk it off” was a cautious, conservative concussion protocol…

Heath secretly hated weekends. They were when he felt most alone, even abandoned, when Vanessa’s implacable choices loomed the starkest, and his own mewling acceptance echoed in the emptiness of her shadow…

For most, it takes a few hard collisions of sunny idealism and cold bewilderment to first see the truth, and usually an accumulation of injustices and embarrassments before we understand how things really are…

My son just finished watching the same clip for the third time, and each time, he said the same thing…

Two amateur teams battled for the national basketball championship in 1962—it was not televised. We cleaned up, Grandad would say…