The Phillies: Poetry in Motion?

Last night, my Philadelphia Phillies (the losingest team in baseball) won the World Series. That's right, a Philadelphia team won a championship, ending the 100 seasons of crap for our four major sports teams. Nearly everyone in my family cried. I stood, alone, in my Arizona living room, as a friend in Philadelphia held up the phone so I could hear the honking outside of her window. I wanted a Yuengling, and someone to yell at me in a horrible Philadelphia accent.

How do you justify writing about this on the literary journal blog that you manage? Easy. You go back through the HFR archives to find a baseball poem to post. Only to discover that HFR has no love for baseball, or Philadelphia, or even the Liberty Bell or the Constitution. On the sporting front, we seem to have some love for swimming, and lots of love for fishing and drinking. Our very first issue has a story about baseball called "Stealing Home" by Steve Beatty, but I am not willing, this morning, to retype the whole thing.

I am told, by a trusted source, that the best baseball poem ever is "Body and Soul" by B.H. Fairchild. "Half-numb, guzzling bourbon and Coke from coffee mugs,/ our fathers fall in love with their own stories, nuzzling/ the facts but mauling the truth, and my friend's father begins/ to lay out with the slow ease of a blues ballad a story/ about sandlot baseball in Commerce, Oklahoma decades ago." This may be how it will go years from now, when I talk about last night to my grandchildren. If any of you out there (so long as you're not a Yankees fan) have other poem suggestions, let's hear them.

Also, to give Philly it's fair literary plug while I have the shot, a few places worth checking out: Philadelphia Stories, The Smart Set, The Painted Bride Quarterly, The Kelly Writers House, and I Read a Short Story Today.