"Sportswriter"
Hartzell’s cartoon bird
on the front page of the Sun
taught me to read—
“Birds edge Bosox” or
“Orioles drub Twins.”
My team routed,
pummeled, crushed,
and bombed opponents—
just like the B-52s
in the headlines.
Years later, in smoke-laden
hallways and shibeens,
the inquisitive eyes
of Jiminy Cricket
peered over horned rims,
grilled my father
for answers.
Others had names
like Tanton, Henneman,
and Bill Free, who dressed
in the style of Superfly
or Charles O. Finley.
“Nobody cares about
the labor pains, just the baby,”
my father told them
on the record. “That referee
is a gutless son-of-a bitch.”
I composed lines
after every game—
imagining myself
in the locker room—
from a stool
in the Owl Bar,
telling strangers
I wrote sports
for the Sun.
But I wasn’t a writer
or a coach’s son
when I looked
in the mirror
at my audience
of one—
drunk yet again.
from Baltimore Sons by Dean Bartoli Smith (Stillhouse Press).
Dean Smith is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including "American Boy" and "Never Easy, Never Pretty: A Fan, A City, A Championship Season." Having completed five years as director of Cornell University Press, he left in 2019 to take the helm at Duke University Press.
"In Baltimore Sons, the city rises inside the breath of memories that are the history of a place. In Smith’s terse language, Baltimore is the heart of the nation, containing all the hopes and wrecked dreams, drawing them along the persistent presence of our tragic bonding with drugs, guns and violence. Walking the aisles of an army surplus store, finding a loaded revolver inside an old shoebox, sitting alone in a diner with a hot roast beef sandwich, these are the markers of the common experience of men growing up in cities. . . . Baltimore Sons is the vision of a just life rising in the consciousness of a believer whose hope is rooted in what is real."
Afaa M. Weaver, author of Spirit Boxing