Lyric Essays
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TEAM FLAME, A Hermit Crab Essay in a baseball lineup card
Nine at bats CLEANUP BATTER Number 14, First Base, Antelope Ranch (Coaches note: power and contact) Motorcycling headlong into July’s hot wind, I was nearly there when I turned onto a dirt road and rumbled fifteen miles over boulders and ditches strewn with whitewashed bones: antelope skeletons, scattered ribs, skulls bleached by sun. I was…
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TEAM FLAME, A Hermit Crab Essay in a baseball lineup card
Nine at bats BATTING THIRD Number 5, Third Base, Coal (Coaches note: the best hitter) In the lineup’s three hole, the hitter must have power and make contact. In the summer season of my life, when I was full of velocity and ambition, I was that power aiming for contact whenever heat met me and…
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TEAM FLAME, A Hermit Crab Essay in a Lineup Card
Nine at bats BATTING SECOND Number 4, Short Stop, Asphalt (Coaches note: the fastest runner) On desert rides heat is built into the asphalt like a burning memory. In the desert’s hot waves, I recall Midwest summers when ball fields baked under August suns and my heart learned how quickly it could burn and how…
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TEAM FLAME, a Hermit Crab Essay in a baseball lineup card
The prophets received pillars of fire; Moses the eternal flame. I only get UV warnings and dehydration. But revelation always begins in these emptying’s and abrasions, so voided and cut, I’ll aim for the pitch when it comes in hot and burning. That’s what team flame does, we’re nine batters chasing heat.
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Why Liturgist of the Land
A Single Work Completed Does anyone experience a single work completed? A work done so perfectly that nothing more needs to be added or taken away. In my recent lyric essay “Liturgist of the Land: A Single Work Completed,” the entire meditation turns on four actions. They form the simplest structure of labor I have…
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Excerpt, A Motorcycle Ride in Mexico
Dust eats away at my skin. The leather I wear makes every minute an inferno on the motorcycle. Heat explodes up my ass, creeping past crack and sack to pillage my spine and overburden my shoulders. But I am an adult, I am in Mexico, I have documents and a clean record; I can drink,…
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Playing Catch: A Simple Magic Endures
Days up in the trees are coming to a close for Debbie and I. We’ve done zero to 61 in about 30 days. That’s not a measure of speed but a marker of age for the people we hold dear. To be exact, it goes from six months to 61 years. Here, a short video…
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The Diamond Speaks in Runes
And the Diamond Speaks in Runes By Gregory Ormson If my friends could get out of their summer houses, we met at the diamond to sharpen the angles of our wild fastballs. The guts of our dirty brown ball unraveled like a tongue, wagging at the glove skipping by, hurling past the catcher in angry…