The Expos

The Expos

By Paul Doty

The Expos were doomed, the small barn on my property is doomed,
its demise foretold in sagging windows, resident squirrels, and once
symmetrical lines knuckling.  Settling in the shade of a spruce tree
(which is itself dying) the barn tilts like it’s going to lean on the tree
and go to sleep.  Not too far southwest of Montreal forsaken barns
in New York State squat like catchers waiting for complicated signs,
as swallows weave back and forth through darkened barn doors and
turnstiles of Expos past.  There are working farms here, but there are
also fallow farms, historical markers swallowed in vines, and towns
where a 7-11 is the only lit business on Main Street.  At the counter
an old guy in an Expos cap, the original design with white panels,
like an empathic exclamation in French the pronunciation remembered
but the translation forgotten.  A memory not of better times, but of
habitants with station wagons and means for an afternoon at the ball
game in Montreal.  Memory of symmetrical hard blue plastic Olympic
Stadium seats, the team in Washington, baseball as manifest destiny,
the Fleur-de-lis and seed catalogs left behind. 

This poem was nominated for Best of the Net.

Paul Doty is the Special Collections and Archives Librarian at St Lawrence University. He resides with his wife Agnes about a two-and-a-half hour drive southwest of Montreal, and took in an Expos game annually between 1998-2004.

Jason David Córdova lives in Puerto Rico as an illustrator and painter. Some of his art can be seen on Instagram at @jasoni72. You can visit his shop on Red Bubble.