Puerto Rican leather sits on my shoulders

Balanced like wooden bats we swing in summer.

“Come on, Cin. Give me the boy. We’re gonna go watch the game.”

The crack of wood against cowhide and cork.

Sweat drips like gutters in a summer gale.

Grandfather left his story in my hands but dropped off

This world before I could tell it.

Puerto Rico was his prison. America, his diamond.

I hit first base, a sewer cap in the middle of the 900 block of Mapleton.

Dirt roads and brick stitched his game.

Pecked my forehead with dry lips. “Nieto,” he would whisper.

A baseball-size hole spliced its way through a glass door.

But all that could be heard were summer crickets singing.

Notes:

This piece is included in Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High School, edited by Hanif Abdurraqib, Franny Choi, Peter Kahn, and Dan Sullivan. Published by Penguin Workshop. All poems are copyright of their respective authors.

Source: Poetry (December 2021)