Two Fables about Missed Connections at a Ballgame

The immediacy of a rope pulled foul crests above the upper deck rail, at peak imitating the towering LEDs illuminating the game: We bend at the ball like stems straightening toward a bulb, or recoil, all reorienting to sips chatter and the Gram as the ball descends slicing underneath the overhang.

MORAL: A man plucks the ball from a pack of fingers – wrists joined, it disappears into his hands clasping with a flytrap snap– and daps up his section on the Jumbotron. 

Unwavering, the off speed toss tumbled with romcom clarity at home’s heart.

MORAL: The catcher clamps the breeze back off barrel contact clobbering their shared target.

Alex Wells Shapiro (he/him) is a poet and artist from New York, living in Chicago. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. He has published or forthcoming work in Tiny Seed, unstamatic, Meat for Tea, and Digging Through the Fat. He is a Fiction Reader for Another Chicago Magazine and co-founder of Exhibit B: A Reading Series presented by The Guild Complex. More of his work may be found at www.alexwellsshapiro.com.