Becoming a Baseball Pitcher

Becoming a Baseball Pitcher

By Steven Pelcman

Artwork by Scott Bolohan

The stiff grip on the stitching
of the ball he held in his palm
reminded him of the scraggly
rawness of his father’s beard
 
rubbing against his face
that hot summer he first picked up
a baseball and threw it into
an old forgotten mitt,
 
leaving a dark sound
against leather that filled him
and made his blood hot
and his body rigid.
 
He had spun the ball
behind his back
the way he had first held 
his father’s fingers
 
playing and teasing
counting and challenging
a father’s strength
and the order of things.
 
The old man pounded the glove
and pumped his fist giving a sign
and the boy leaned into
the exaggerated shadow
 
stretching across the dirt
with the hungry look
of an animal targeting prey
in the distance.
 
The faster he threw,
the smaller the world
would become until his father
became, the old man
 
with the grey beard
in the stands behind home plate
as his son stood poised
on the mound,
 
his heartbeat slowly increasing
to the speed of the ball
he would throw
and the sound it would make.
 
He would never be closer
to his father than that day
when strike three unleashed
the roar of the crowd
 
as the beads of sweat kept falling
to the ground and the gentle wind
blustered through the jersey
his father had once worn.

Steven Pelcman is an American writer of poetry and short stories who has been published in a number of magazines including: The Windsor Review, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Fourth River magazine, River Oak Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, the Tulane Review, The Baltimore Review, The Warwick Review, The Greensboro Review, etc. He was nominated for the 2012 Pushcart Prize for individual poems and his volume of poetry, like water to STONE, Adelaide Books was nominated for the 2017 Pushcart prize. In addition he has published poetry books: American Voices, Outlaws Publishing 2017 and Where the Leaves Darken, 2018 Adelaide Books. He has published the novel, Riverbed, Mirador Publications May, 2020. For more, you can visit his website, Facebook, and Goodreads.