Posts by Michael Deagler

May 23, 2017 | Interview

An Interview With Christine Sneed

Michael Deagler

I think everyone has heard this a lot but it’s still true — read with curiosity and hunger — reading is as important as writing, more important, probably, when you’re first starting to write.

May 18, 2017 | Fiction

The Bird

Sandra Jensen

‘There are so many damaged birds,’ he said, spreading jam on his sourdough toast. 

‘I haven’t seen that many,’ I said. 

‘Well, I have,’ he said. ‘And I was just too tired to do what we did for that seagull.’

May 16, 2017 | Interview

An Interview with Rebecca Schiff 

Michael Deagler

I don’t have any goals except to make the reader think and feel. What they think and feel is up to them. 

May 15, 2017 | Fiction

The End of the World and Karate 

Al Dixon

On the way home from picking up my brother at the airport, I stopped for a hitchhiker. I’d never picked up a hitchhiker before. I think I did it because my brother was with me, Julian. It was the kind of thing Julian would do.

May 13, 2017 | Fiction

White Dwarf Seeks Red Giant for Binary Orbit

Samantha Edmonds

We’ll have more in common than you’d think—after all, we’re both main sequence stars, I’m just a few million years ahead of you. 

May 8, 2017 | Nonfiction

Pretty Potion

Jen Palmares Meadows

In the afternoons, I stripped off my boyish clothing and watched back to back episodes of Saved by the Bell, feeding my unhealthy obsession for Kelly KAPOWski. The perky brunette with her slim ankles and come-hither hair tosses was the ultimate teenage bombshell. 

May 5, 2017 | Poetry

Five Poems

Bud Smith

Remember, there’s a light emitting from you and it's not just your cellphone. / The Internet is a scorched wasteland. / But you've walked through worse places / on your way to work.

April 29, 2017 | Poetry

WHEN ONE MORNING I WOKE UP MISSING JOEY CARUSO, THE BEST SECONDBASEMAN I EVER PLAYED WITH. I COULDN’T SHAKE IT OFF, THIS MISSING. SO I WROTE THIS POEM

Devin Kelly

It means nothing now but it meant enough then, enough to change a life, to alter the smooth rhythmic turning of the world. 

April 28, 2017 | Poetry

Carl Mays Kills Ray Chapman

Andrew Butler

He doesn’t have any friends and doesn’t want any.

That’s the only way Mays can pitch, 

 

because he doesn’t play the game 

of fraternity formed on summer ballfields. 

April 28, 2017 | Nonfiction

The Big Inning: Game 95 // Ninth Inning, Chicago // The Cubbies Win the Pennant

Brendan Donley

What can be said about this game that hasn’t already been said about Christmas morning? Better than that. The first day of a summer break. Better than that. Evening fireworks on the 4th of July. That, too. Better than all. A graduation, an engagement, a marriage, a festival, a celebration. An outdoor fete to anything.

April 27, 2017 | Nonfiction

The Big Inning: Game 69 // Seventh Inning, Los Angeles // A Silent Gift, for Vin Scully

Brendan Donley

Vin Scully alone in a broadcast booth, talking by himself, talking to us. Assuring the world that all’s well in Dodgeralia. Calm. Composed. At home, in a park he’ll depart at season’s end. Handpicking his words, off endless branches, branches’ branches, in a deep memory he builds, maintains over many years, keeps polished like a jewel.

April 26, 2017 | Fiction

Swinging

Brendan J. O'Brien

Oscar kisses the child through the hard mesh fence designed for the fans’ protection.  He does not like kissing his boy through hard mesh.   

April 20, 2017 | Poetry

Three Poems

David Byron Queen

How fucking weird is the knuckle ball?

April 14, 2017 | Nonfiction

Playing Baseball Mediocrely but Playing Baseball with Pure Joy

Julia Dixon Evans

I wanted to focus on the real victims, unthinkable crimes against them, but I kept coming back to those batting cages, to that uniform in Coach B's house.

April 4, 2017 | Nonfiction

Hateball

Bud Smith

I wanted to quit, and was too young to realize that I could just quit anything.

March 31, 2017 | Nonfiction

Now the wren has gone to roost 

Drew Knapp

The trees all richly clad, yet devoid of pride, fat with birds and the season, have called back days and years for the history they are giving me. 

March 22, 2017 | Poetry

Two Poems

Rosebud Ben-Oni

Signals

When dead whales wash up on your shores,
it's not your insult to heaven, nor your fifteen-

        foot song carried

                       by high tide into flushing

March 20, 2017 | Fiction

The Drive

Brendan Mathews

The parents come home tired, they come home smiling, they come home angry, they come home drunk.

March 17, 2017 | Poetry

Three Poems

Brandi Kalicki

soliciting chimps / in the shit cage

March 10, 2017 | Fiction

Below the Chandelier

Derick Dupre

He can’t respond to the man addressing him as Mr. Sport because he can’t talk, his tongue has been mangled, somewhat ineptly, and he sees the hilarity in this, being tortured by inept torturers, as another larger silent gentleman’s behind him, but if it weren’t him in the chair, if it were someone else and he was watching, he might be amused by these two dilettantes practicing the art of torture.