By Kevin T. Cantwell 

There was that day Prime had his run-in with Carlton Fisk,
granite face of New England, calling a frame against New York.
We didn’t know until later what was said, but Pudge allowed
Deion Sanders didn’t run out a fly ball, that growing up everyone
looked up to the Pinstripes of that old Bronx lineup.
This colloquy went on the entire game, some said his career
in baseball. Run, you piece of shit, something like that
said to the two-sport star. Fisk you’ll remember had waved
his homerun fair in that famous late-night Game Six
in the fall classic against Sparky’s Big Red Machine but that
was then and maybe it was just the code between backstops
or the dollar sign Prime had drawn in the dirt and the way too
Gary Sheffield used to brush his forearm when explaining
a strike against him, catching the black he implied,
meaning, the way he touched his skin, that any other player,
by which he meant white, would have gotten the call.
And when I was a kid, I followed Curt Flood’s travails
and didn’t understand The Washington Post’s take on him,
until it came to me so many years later that they were old
white guys from down South staking out their position
on the reserve clause. And sure, we have to own our own
bullshit, as I thought that way about Deion too, run,
play the game the right way, so goes the saw, or someday
you’ll have the game shoved down your throat. Easy
enough to believe, and Prime Time would reply that the days
of slavery were over; and today, reading about McCarver,
dead of heart failure, the Mouth of Memphis, who had
his own run-in with Prime, ending with ice water dumped
over him repeatedly and then Bo Jackson, on that, who said
if you’re in a championship clubhouse, you’re gonna
get wet. And sure, some of my family hated McCarver, too,
not that it was personal, just the ‘68 World Series, someone
to hate on, though we would win it with three complete games
tossed by Mickey Lolich. My mother said he talked
too much, back to McCarver now, although I would say to her
that no one wants to hear the game crackle through a silent mic.
Look, Fisk went at it with Munson and “Sweet Lou” Pinella,
and when he was locked out of the Chicago clubhouse
after his career he went back to New England and there
would be that piece in SI of him in his wool lumberjack shirt
splitting wood for the winter. Do not speak to me of Jim
Leyritz, as this is backwoods Braves country here, but of his ilk
remember the Duck Hunter, lifting Ron Gant from first base
and getting the tag as if he had stepped off the bag,
that being Kent Hrbek, who had disappeared one day
to hunt the Minnesota marshes the morning of a night game.
Who remembers that or the deke against Lonnie Smith
that might have lost us that game and the Series too,
but mom said go easy on him, Lonnie was always a winner.
And true it gets said that Timmy had N-worded a kid
who had snuck into the bleachers to snag flyballs, and true,
it gets said, that Bob Gibson had set him straight. Prime had a mouth
on him. Timmy had a mouth, as do all catchers, my cousin
said, as my brother and I and the cuz texted back and forth
regarding one more name in the sizzling lights gone
from when we were kids, a high ball fading foul through cold rain,
and Lolich unlocking his bakery on the Feast of the Epiphany,
a Croat, who had set them sideways too, his own Tigers
down in Lakeland, when he wheeled in late for spring training
having just sat for an exam to be an off-season mailman.

Kevin Cantwell is the author of the poetry collections One Thousand Sheets of Rice Paper (Mercer University Press, 2023),Something Black in the Green Part of Your Eye (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2002), and One of Those Russian Novels (What Books Press, 2009). He has received a River City Poetry Award, an Agnes Scott Poetry Award, and a James Dickey Prize. Cantwell edited Writing on Napkins at the Sunshine Club: An Anthology of Poets Writing in Macon (Mercer University Press, 2011). He works in the president’s office at Middle Georgia State University.