Stanwix Street

A vanilla ice cream cone
covered with sprinkles of dirt,
a handful tossed by small, grimy hands
across a chain-link fence.
A blond child’s whine—
flat, constant and eerily melodic.
The girl then turning away,
screaming upstairs to her mother,
sound asleep in the mid-August heat,
the lime-green curtains fluttering in the
second-story window of the adjacent brick building.
The child just standing there, scraping off the grit
and licking the melting residue
trickling down her forearm.

Streetlight Paradise

Chalk marks on sidewalks,
fireflies stalking the night,
creaky porch steps,
chain-link nets and
the crack of the bat.

Sour-puss lips break a smile,
then sneak a kiss.
It’s cool to hold hands with
the girl of your dreams,
the one who says she’ll
love you forever.

But forever is too far away.
Our time is now—a passing moment
when our parents look the other way.

Summer fun in the springtime
of our lives, sucking it all in
under this streetlight paradise.

The Mystery of the Wolf

A summer evening in upstate New York—
a backyard sprinkler hisses
while the smell of fresh-cut grass
is pungent and delicious.
Crickets chirp and a coffee-colored mare
snorts from across the barbed-wire fence.

I am alone, kicking a soccer ball,
when a gray wolf emerges from
the high weeds lining the fence.
I try to run, but my legs lock up,
and I tumble to the ground.

The wolf circles me,
then sweeps in on my limp frame.
I can hear its stomach growling
as it hovers over me.
The tongue is extended
and drool splashes my face.
The wolf takes my neck in its mouth,
but does not bite down.

And I wake up in my bed,
thankful that the encounter is just a dream.
I am safe, and no wolf invades my room.
Yet I remain troubled,
afraid of closing my eyes,
drifting back to sleep
and ending up at the mercy
of another predator.

Minors

Toledo in July—a Mud Hens game:
Big league dreamers with names like Bubba, Fausto and Tyler
toil away in the minors,
hustling for the scouts perched behind home plate,
diving for line drives and sliding head first,
with egos in check and mouths full of dirt.

Pillars of artificial light frame the setting sun,
and from beyond the azure sky,
the ghosts of washed-up utility infielders
and middle relief pitchers
pull for these hard luck Triple-A players.
They want to scream, “Take heed, savor it now,
for this is the best you will ever be.”
But they’re under orders to keep their mouths shut,
and can only blow a home run foul every once in a while.

The steel girder stands are filled with a crowd
that still believes in this clockless game.
They listen intently for the crack of the bat,
and sing with all their might during the seventh-inning stretch.

Little kids with hot pink shorts and noisy flip-flops
smear their faces with mustard and hug Muddy the mascot.
They scatter peanut shells and scamper after foul balls,
and for them the score is merely an afterthought.

The summer night comes to a close
with a game-ending double play and a fireworks barrage.
The fans file out and load into their cars,
going back to real life with memories of Mud Hens
now stitched in the seams of their minds.

(All four poems were previously published in Dreaming of Lemon Trees: Selected Poems, Finishing Line Press, 2019).