on the day my sister was born,
my dad took me to a minor league baseball game.

i watched the pitcher as he chewed the
pitcher’s mound to shreds with the teeth
of his stride. the ball combed the air, taking with it debris from the kind of sad people
who show up to watch short-a ball
while somewhere, a little girl is
dragging out her claws and staking her
claim on the operating table.

my older brother littered the yard with
bottle caps. this stadium was his dream.
he would have slept in the unheated walls
for a chance to touch all 216 stitches
with two perfect hands.

the batters today are fooled by
a series of nasty changeups that
cough their hearts up. peanut
butter and jelly awaits them in the
dugout. a couple of halfhearted
diehards keep score on the back
of their wrists, the pen tying up
their veins. the pitcher authors
the whole game like that, a painful
rush.

i want to leave. the kind of
faultless art makes me sick. he
was born in uniform, certainly,
and glowing, his arm whipping
around from the womb and tossing
out any notion of normalcy his parents
may have held. nobody can touch him.
he never cut his feet on old
beer caps in a quest to touch
a patchwork god.

the next hitter becomes a runner
when his hands take his heart
around the block and come back
with a ball cutting the air, colliding
with a meteor that surely would have
destroyed the world. someday on a
faraway planet they will see that ball
bouncing through the stars, restless as
the man who drove it. that spot on the
atmosphere may never recover from its
brush with non-destiny.

nobody dreams in the minor leagues, not even
the batter-runner whose arms have just
propelled his team to a spot above
heaven. god will surely collapse them soon.

there is a girl somewhere, being bathed
by a stranger. she has ceased to be dead.
a miracle for certain.