Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks Consider the 1942 World Series

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks Consider the 1942 World Series

By Joseph Stanton

“I’m rooting for the Cardinals anyway,”
she mutters staring at her pack of matches.

“No way the Yanks can lose!” he declares
to his wife, the counterman, and the world

in general. “They creamed that Mort Cooper,
and he’s the only real pitcher they’ve got.

This guy Beasley they’re putting on the mound
tomorrow? A punk kid. I’ll bet the Yankees

chew him up and spit him out in the first.
No way this Series is going more than five.”

Joseph Stanton‘s six poetry books are Moving Pictures, Things Seen, Imaginary Museum: Poems on Art, A Field Guide to the Wildlife of Suburban Oahu, Cardinal Points: Poems on St. Louis Cardinals Baseball, and What the Kite Thinks. His other books include Looking for Edward Gorey, The Important Books: Children’s Picture Books as Art and Literature, and Stan Musial: A Biography. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Harvard Review, New Letters, Poetry East, Antioch Review, Cortland Review, New York Quarterly, Spitball, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Sport Literate, and many other journals and anthologies. Articles of his on baseball poetry and baseball art have appeared in issues of The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, Nine: A Journal of Baseball History & Culture, and Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature. He is a Professor Emeritus of Art History and American Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Jason Cordova Vega is an illustrator who lives in Puerto Rico. Some of his art can be seen on Instagram at @jasoni72.

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