by Michael C. Roberts
That Ball
Before we could begin
to trade that hard, white sphere
we had to move apart
to our preserves of grass.
I used the ball to throw
some virile arcs across
my boyhood’s story.
You lived within your body,
knew it needed movement, practice.
The ball linked us,
though it failed at last.
Once, I watched you dreaming, drifting
in and out of sleep. Your left arm rose,
your hand opened, closed and settled.
“A little comebacker,” you said,
and smiled, the ball now wedged
into your glove, that oiled hand.
I’d seen you intercept the batter’s
hope like that so many times
in little league. I’d win the greater
share of our father’s love,
yet couldn’t reckon with that
casual, flicking movement.
The ball, stained green – it was
all of ourselves
we had to touch.
Clark Bouwman is an essayist, poet, and translator living in Richmond, California. His work has appeared in Gargoyle Online, The Arts Fuse, The Dreaming Machine, The Antonym, Minimus, The Takoma Voice, and in the anthology Music Gigs Gone Wrong. Originally from the DC area, he and his wife moved to the bay area in 2018 to help with their grandchildren.
Michael C. Roberts is a sort-of retired clinical child/pediatric psychologist with a passion for retro-analogue photography. He often makes images on film via cheap cameras with plastic lenses and spring mechanisms to produce a dreamy soft focus on photographic film and some vignetting. The cameras allow double exposures in the camera, light leaks in reddish or whitish clouds along with scratches on the film. His film and digital photographs have appeared in American Psychologist, Health Psychology, The Canary, Images Arizona, Burningword, The Storms, The Healing Muse, and elsewhere. His book of photographs, “Imaging the World with Plastic Cameras: Diana and Holga,” is available on Amazon. Twitter/X @MichaelCRobert3 Instagram @michaelroberts1018.