THE ROAR AT WRIGLEY FIELD

In the bleachers on an afternoon game — the sun tucked away behind a supporting wall of Wrigley Field stadium — the three of you are celebrating baseball in Chicago’s biggest hit. I am with him again, somewhere over the rainbow & back to you. I am reading something important, literature fixed on a smart phone. I am lost in & to large ideas. Love is in the way. He fires arrows relentlessly. My only reliable god. Literature breaks the vertebrae of resolve. I am reading Pasternak’s Hamlet. It is an ambitious translation, at times nothing closely resembling the original. Visotsky on YouTube — between plays — echoes the new work of art. The infield is a beautiful stage for America. All around me children capped in baseball caps spin balls en plein air. The strikes, the science of the throw. Game theory in play before all of us. Facing things straight on. Hitting things out of the park.

Stella Hayes is the author of a poetry collection One Strange Country (What Books Press, forthcoming in 2020). Stella Hayes grew up in an agricultural town outside of Kiev, Ukraine and Los Angeles. She earned a creative writing degree at University of Southern California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prelude, The Hunger, The Indianapolis Review, Cleaver and Spillway, among others. She lives in Larchmont with her husband writer, Dade Hayes, and their two children.