Stickball Cemetery

April is National Poetry Month! I aim to post a poem each weekday in celebration of the form. Some old, some new, some published, some never before seen.

This poem started out as a writing prompt, which went like this: close your eyes and smell your surroundings. At the time, I was in a room with a rug which I had purchased second-hand from a friend of mine. I hadn’t noticed it before, but the rug smelled faintly of wet dog. That smell sparked a long-dormant memory of my Grandma Lemke’s dog, which had died some thirty-five years ago, and was buried next to the garage. In Minnesota summers of the late 1980s and early 90s, my sisters and cousins and I would often play stickball in Grandma’s backyard. Princess’s grave was our first base. Once I had that image and memory, the rest of the poem fell into place. It combines two of life’s great mysteries: death and baseball.

I submitted this poem to an Irish publication, and to my great surprise, it was chosen — by judge BILLY COLLINS of all people — as an honorable mention, and subsequently printed in Fish Anthology 2022.

Stickball Cemetery


Nine on nine:

Gramma's backyard hums
under low-slung power lines.
Wiffle balls whiz over Mr. Swenson’s fence
as the aunts and uncles
joke and choke and smoke.

Princess, Gramma's Pekingese, 
is first base.
She’s buried beneath 
the pink-petalled peonies 
—ants marching up and in.

In the third inning,
Aunt Alida goes down swinging.
We carry her out past the cucumber patch
and bury her under lilacs in left-center.
Seven on six.

Uncle Antone caught heat 
for arguing the strike zone.
Now he’s tangled in the twisted roots 
of a chokecherry bush in right field.
Five on four.

Dear Cousin Lee, MVP
of the Moorhead Moonshots
got called to the majors in the fifth.
Swinging a stick too thick for rookie league,
his headstone became home plate.

Gramma was next on deck, 
and grounded out. 
We planted her under the pitcher’s mound
—that pounding leathered heart of the diamond.

Three on two.

Seventh inning stretch.
Flicker and rest.
Cottonwood snowflakes 
drift across the outfield,
a slow-motion blizzard 
in midsummer’s simmer.
Porchlights flick on, 
flooding the infield grass.
Stars pop up 
in the Minnesota sky
one by one,
as the bug zapper 
in Gramma's garage 
sizzles moths,

one by one.
Rest and flicker,
flicker and rest.

We round the bases
and slide 
underground,
one by one.
Innings piling up,
no relief in the ‘pen.

Mom. Then Dad. Then me,
in a still, moonless night. 
Crickets chirp.
Stars pop up
in the Minnesota sky

one by one.