Sometimes I forget baseball
Sometimes I forget baseball
Emily Ahmed
was my favorite sport as a kid,
tied with swimming, or dance.
But I was too inflexible
to be the right kind of dancer,
my teacher clucking about
my muscles being tight,
my limbs lanky without the grace
of a ballerina. Swimming I could do
for hours, and did, only I shivered
violently if I entered the deep end,
being shrimpy in the wrong way
and besides, I hated my legs.
But baseball I could play alone
in the park, throw the ball in the air
for myself, and run to each base
like the flicker of a flame, being among
the fastest girls in our grade. When I moved
to the United States, it was just before
the season my friends joined teams
and one mailed me a photo of herself
holding a bat while I resigned myself
to wearing baggy clothes, playing
computer games in the basement,
watching TV, and drawing comics
of myself as captain of fictional teams.
I learned from American sitcoms
that baseball was called
“America’s favorite pastime,”
and “softball” when women played it.
Maybe I was put off after learning
America’s other pastimes, heartbreaking
and destructive that we were told to love
anyway, maybe it was growing up
with a single mother playing as all the basemen
on the field, maybe it was how in our town
teams were divvied by neighborhood,
and as far as we knew,
our neighborhood didn’t have any.
Maybe we were too busy phoning long-distance
and flipping through photo albums,
too soft already. Sometimes I forget
baseball was my favorite sport,
telling myself I lost interest in it
and all the other things that seem so far away
I can no longer reach them to call home.
Emily Ahmed (she/her) is a mixed-race Egyptian-American writer and author of the poetry collection On Distance, published by Elyssar Press. She was previously published in Mizna, Running Dog, Plentitudes, and others. She is a Michener Fellow and was the 2025 recipient of the Lester Goran Award at the University of Miami Department of English & Creative Writing. She has contributed to Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Project and attended workshops at the University of Miami, 24 Pearl St, and Tin House.
Andy Lattimer is a gay guy who lives in Southern California. He makes comics, most of which are about baseball. You can read them on his website, andylattimer.com
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