Lagos gods

"the gods are exemplars of human striving" —Wole Soyinka
 

Festival aura fills the atmosphere
i rejoice for you                     moyo fun e
i rejoice for myself            

Darling, stop being stupid, 
she says with all the tenderness she can muster,
which is not a lot, when I bring up my ex. 
At the dining table, in the gaudy rust of sunset,
she alternates between

In the morning, we don’t move. I’m satisfied. I’m easy to love. I’m not freezing and still drunk.

Turns out, we decided later, it was silly to try and sell flowers at all. The user experience of flowers had to be re-tooled.

Many languages did not and some still do not include the color word blue. Color words tend to enter languages in the order of black and white (or dark and light), and next red, and next green and yellow, colors that often share one and only one word, and finally blue.

Throughout our first year in that house you woke feeling this ghost’s breath on your face, and at night, sometimes, you’d jump up frantic, swearing you’d felt its grave-clasp on your ankle or arm.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my—when the three of us were together I wondered if I should be the tiger. But I did not feel tigerish by any metaphor. I was not sleek.

The night before Easter he ties his belt around my neck and gives it to me to hold.

Come late spring, my dad turned into a man I didn’t recognize. Normally a quiet man who spent his free hours taking a nap on the couch, he morphed into a talkative baseball fanatic. The Philadelphia

We were allowed to be alone in the stadium, an object which is infinite. Prove it.
I can’t remember if we took the bus. More likely your dad dropped us in traffic and the civic door thunked on our

Somewhere in the archives of Baseball America, there’s a story by an Italian journalist named Giovanna de la something or other, and she attempts to verify, through old box scores and personal

Just ahead is the familiar field, a diamond with rounded corners. I walk up with head down, anticipating that time will drag its feet while I sit and wish I could be attending to other things. But

He was black, handsome, and nonthreatening, so white people loved him.

I think I give non-important people dignity. I still believe there is magic in this world.

The paper said my team (Sand Gnats) had a chance this year (second season with the new name), so I opened the fridge, opened a beer, sat down, and turned the TV on to watch the first game of the

My brother and I were standing outside of the 30th street station in Philadelphia.

I forget how old we were but we were old enough that our mom let us take the train alone from Lancaster to

The one and only time I ever met Ken Griffey, Jr. was at a baseball clinic.

I was hitting off a tee when he strolled up behind me. I was 12, and Junior was still in high school, a volunteer, but

I want to give Glenn Burke a high five / I want to give Glenn Burke a high five for seeing Dusty Baker’s raised hand and just hitting it / I want to give Glenn Burke a high five for coming out in 1978

My legs on yours, in the stadium lights,
I have only just learned your name.
You point, across the outfield,
at the worst fight we will ever have.

I can barely make it out in the crowd
of

The boys are back together and everyone's in town except it's desolate and nobody gives a damn

It took me all morning to build the fence.  I used old lawn chairs, cardboard boxes, and rusty sign posts from the dumpster behind 7-Eleven.  I meant for it to look like Camden Yards.  The right field

Mike and Nick and Tom are already playing stickball in the back lot when Dad drops you off at P.S. 236. On one brick wall they’ve chalked a strike zone, on the floor is a powder-blue pitcher’s mound

you have probably peed with everyone you’ve ever loved, including the woman you do right now

Previously on...
Part 4  ||  Part 3  ||  Part 2  ||  Part 1 

Last year, Tim and I bought cardboard cutouts of ourselves ($129 each, apparently for charity) that watched every Athletics game in the stadium that we could not.