Baseball is, if nothing else, a reason, and so it is everything:

While he runs, you think about how long it’s been since you stepped on a baseball field. Your chest fills up with sharp fragments of Little League afternoons, standing in left field praying for something to do and dreading it at the same time

I used to bring a six pack, pound a beer between tokens, but I’m married now and I have to get home safely.

You look like you just walked out of a punt, pass and kick contest. We gotta make you look sick."

I’m thankful for the throwaways. Like the time the Bears lost in extra innings. Randy Bass, pre-Hanshin Tigers Randy Bass, had committed an error on a routine toss to the pitcher at first. It was

Then something funny happened / after months of imprisonment, / handled like/ animals, less than/ animals, / they started playing baseball.

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

But I see the look on his face, the lawn sprinklers waving back and forth like paper fans, the cicadas and their dim crescendoing dirge, and the panicgrass that the boy runs back through as he realizes what fetching me will cost him.

I wanted to see Akari and have a drink so we could get a little drunk and maybe take our clothes off.

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. 

What I like most about the story is that the grossness makes way for the sadness.

Now Dad would have to drive us to Mom’s in the shit-mobile, which probably wouldn’t start even if he could get the car doors open. Cows were standing pinned between the car and the wall and the doors had been frozen shut since the storm even without all the extra ice and frozen manure. Dad had tried pouring boiling water over the handles days ago, but the doors only worked while the handle was still too hot then froze solid again, worse than before. 

He could kill me right now. I’m rail-thin, depression rotting the muscle off me since I got here. He’s big and strong and calls himself Faheem.

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

Grodstein is the author of four previous books, including the New York Times bestseller A Friend of the Family and the Washington Post Book of the Year The Explanation for Everything. She was kind enough to answer some of my questions regarding OUR SHORT HISTORY, out now from Algonquin Books.

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

That night in April. / That other night in April. 

soliciting chimps / in the shit cage

There are meetings in places that come disguised as something else.

Honoring AV Club's restraining order against me from this day forward

Dear Editor,         or         Owl

Attached are poems in which I spin my head three hundred sixty degrees attempting to stare at myself. Attached are poems in which I attempt to eat myself

Shane said I needed to be more social, network with the other teachers. I told him it was pointless.

“I look forward to the time when I shall refuse to learn another thing, having accumulated errors enough.” Charles Fort

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.