Poetry by Jeff Sirkin

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THE GAME


I don’t know what I’m chasing but there’s a window in front and behind me a screen, and on a patio across town, a blue bird, belly-up on the pavement. There are whistles to keep it all moving, and the commandments outside the courthouse to keep us from scratching at the surface. From home to first and first to etc. Three strikes and you’re out, etc. Underhand, the girl on the mound works her arm. The back swing. The rotation. The final down swing. These are the mechanics of the game, flatted seventh flatted third, the magic of the magnet’s push and pull, the mower blade out past the sidelines spinning against the yellow or white of the dandelion’s persistent pop and growl. There’s the pitch and the swing and a grounder to short—a tricky hop but she gloves it and tosses it hard to the kid at first, who bounces it off the top of his mitt and into the trees, letting two runners home. The coach is on about repetition, about eyes on the ball. The coach says don’t worry, you’ll get ‘em next time. Turn to the sun and spread your glorious mats of blue. Run the bases ‘til you’re out. The other team will take the field. The whistle will blow, and we’ll all go home, fingers resting across the seams. 





AN HONEST ADMISSION 


But who needs the sun when we have color, when we have the gentle sway of a cartography that knows no bounds, a house that won’t open its heart to the cold returns of a dirty election. O field of flowering weeds. O city worker with your power sprayer blasting away at the tatty walk by the church. Have you heard? The County Commissioner wants to mix us a drink. The investor wants us to walk his empty lot and breath in the lines of access there. So, we count the native birds of eastern Nebraska lining the shelves on Main Street. We watch the opportunists drink the tears that could spring us from the ditches, wrapped in vines and candied hearts. We follow the brick road past the secretary’s pool, past the tracks out to the battered margins. Let’s throw one back for all these false starts and open wounds, and flush out what remains. 

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THE TELLER’S LAMENT


A loopy kick and the ball hops the fence, bouncing into the street. It’s a new week and the kids are on to kickball now, in shorts and hoodies, a cold rain overnight having swept aside the mounting pressure of previous days. A boy in blue and red stripes sneaks through a gap in the chain link, and leaps into the gamble of the intersection, slippery today with silt and mud, the warp and wobble of the familiar brick. And then the whistle sounds and, snap, they’re all gone, back to class. That’s just how it is. Listen and you’ll hear the rattle of an unseen mower. A robin splashing in the middle of the street. You want to tell her there’s a car coming, that it’s missing a wheel cover, that the driver is lost in her dwindling balance, but, not to worry, she’ll beat it to the fence, and beyond. Tired old History, kite strings limping along your soggy circuit. The bank teller showing off in the ballroom of the neglected statehouse up the street. Relevé. Saubresaut. Grand Jeté. Rusty tools and machine parts, solid state radios and uncoupled speedometers, Zippos and twisted eyeglass frames. Flight is the practice of the gentle return. Ask the coach. Ask the groundskeeper. What a meager imagination one must have who looks at the fallow plot and thinks it will forever remain just so.



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Jeff Sirkin is the author of the poetry collection Travelers Aid Society (Veliz Books) and the micro-chapbook Summer Break (Rinky Dink Press). His work has appeared in Fence; The Literary Review; SplitLevel Journal; Forklift, Ohio; and elsewhere. Co-editor of the online poetry journal A DOZEN NOTHING (www.ADozenNothing.com) he currently teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Texas El Paso.