The Time Is Now

Poets & Writers Magazine has this cool thing called The Time Is Now.  The Time Is Now offers a weekly writing prompt to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. They post a poetry prompt on Mondays and a fiction prompt on Thursdays. Get writing here!

Here is one of my favorite Write Now prompts from January 10:

Write an erasure poem: Rip out one or two pages from a magazine or newspaper. Read through them, underlining words and phrases that appeal to you and that relate to each other. Using a marker or White-Out, begin to delete the words around those you underlined, leaving words and phrases that you might want to use. Keep deleting the extra language, working to construct poetic lines with the words you’ve chosen to keep.

Keeping with the baseball and poetry theme from the previous post, I've decided to share my erasure poem. I ripped out two pages from the September 12, 2005 issue of The New Yorker. Ironically, the article was about Rickey Henderson.  This is what I came up with:

Desert Sun Stadium

The desert: a prison that housed outlaws from the Wild West 

Players lounging in their underwear, chewing sunflower seeds

It ain’t Yankee Stadium

A hundred and nine degrees, hard to breathe 

Sign autographs, pose for photographs

I’m the Babe Ruth of independent leagues

Five feet ten, like a Rockette pressing forward

He hides behind wraparound sunglasses

Pants above his hips

Creases on his forehead, around his mouth

Tapped dirt out of his cleats

A cloud of dust

Where’s your fucking wheelchair?    

Time defeated the man of steal

Unceremoniously released him

Three thousand and eighty-one games

Slash at balls as they shot out of a pitching machine

Eighty-five miles an hour

No injuries. No problem with my eyes. Knees are good.

I have a little pain in my hip

Ain’t nothin’ a little ice can’t cure

Sitting on a metal chair with his shirt off

Dad, why are you doing this?

He wanted to make it to the majors

Trying to make it back to the show

They never treat us old guys well

I could go out the way I came in

It’s time to finally let go

I wasn’t getting my bat out right

Into the cage

You’re stepping too far in

The divot in the dirt too deep into his head  

Stealing Home

One night in Fresno, California, 1977

Private eyes reported back

“Your father is dead.”

An unlikely father figure

A pugnacious drinker who slugged one of his own

An in-your-face approach to the game, a  manic style of play

The catalyst, the creator of chaos

Wreak havoc on the defense

Each hitter has a strike zone uncommonly small

The size of Hitler’s heart

Collapsing his shoulders to his knees

Get on base

Three-run homers and big innings

Be a nuisance, a pest

Steal second. Steal third. Stole home four times.

It’s Rickey Henderson Night

I hear he never lifts weights—he only does pushups and situps

A yellow Volkswagen Beetle

A pair of rodent-like ears attached to its roof

A curly tail sticking out of its trunk

It’s time to exterminate the competition

Truly Nolen Pest Control—We get the bugs out for you

On the bench, soaked with sweat

Cheerleaders danced on the dugout roof

See if you can answer tonight’s trivia question

Why won’t he quit and come home?

He began to run

Fireworks explode

You got to be fearless

They’re coming for you

Everyone in the stadium knows

I don’t give a dang

Bounce violently, brutally pounding his body

Everyone knows you’re going

I’m gone

Start out low

The final touch

Feet first

Head first

Find that one part of the body that tells you he’s home

Feel free to post your erasure poems.