The Jaws of Victory

The Jaws of Victory

By Lynn Gilbert

       “..the Mets, with the finest defense since Stalingrad…”
        —Roger Angell, in The New Yorker
 
 
Rain falls in Queens. Rain since the fifth inning
of this Pennant game, now in its sixth hour,
has forced delay. Game’s tied; no one’s winning
and no runs since the fourth. The wet fans lour
huddled in makeshift garbage-bag rain gear
or jackets on their heads; outfield’s awash.
At the fourteenth-inning stretch, all groan to hear
the former record time for a play-off clash.
 
But even Purgatory has an end:
The visitors drive in a single clout
to pull ahead. The hometown losers then—
whose every game has seemed their last—break out
in their fifteenth: three walks, two singles, grand
slam. Mets fans taste all the triumph they can stand.

Lynn Gilbert has had poems in Blue Unicorn, Concho River Review, Exquisite Corpse, Gnu, The Huron River Review, Kansas Quarterly, Light, Mezzo Cammin, Mortar, Peninsula Poets, and The Texas Observer, among others. She was a founding editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and a finalist in the Gerald Cable Book Award, 2022. She helps edit Third Wednesday literary magazine.

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