In the Juvenile Stacks

In the Juvenile Stacks

By Rupert Fike

Get on with it! – that was my boyhood quarrel 
with biographies, a big J on their spine –
I wanted Stan Musial to escape that coal-mining town,
Mel Ott to arrive in New York, impress McGraw.
I wanted Babe Ruth (when they still called him, George)
to start hitting homers instead of chapter after chapter
praising the Baltimore priests who showed him
endless boring kindness. Enough with the Christian Brothers!
I wanted to get to the part where the boy, 
older now, first took one so deep to right field,
the ball arcing, going, gone, the ball bouncing
once in the teeming city street past the fence,
the ball spooking a team of horses into rearing, 
milk jugs tipped over, teamsters swearing,
a kid hopping the fence to retrieve the ball,
two elderly nuns in the bleachers rising, pointing,
“Father, did you see where George hit it?”
That right there was why I checked out the book.

Rupert Fike’s second collection of poems, Hello the House, (Snake Nation Press, 2018) won the Haas Poetry Prize and was listed as one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read, 2018.” His work has appeared in The Southern Poetry Review, The Sun (forthcoming), Scalawag Magazine, The Georgetown Review,  A&U America’s AIDS Magazine, The Flannery O’Connor Review, The Buddhist Poetry Review, Natural Bridge and others. He has a poem inscribed in a downtown Atlanta plaza, and his non-fiction, Voices from The Farm, examines his nine years on a spiritual commune.