South Bronx Stickball Bats | Bronx, Stickball

Spindle is an online literary magazine with a twist, featuring creative non-fiction, poetry and short fiction by, for and about New Yorkers -- literal and spiritual. Showcasing emerging writers, artists, musicians and other notable New Yorkers, it offers a multi-faceted look at New York City and the world beyond through the eyes of both those who love it and hate it, and in many cases, a peek inside the minds of the people themselves.

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Thursday, 11 March 2010

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South Bronx Stickball Bats

By J.T. Clark,

Favoured : 119

Published in : , Poetry

If we were without scratch, one of us flung
Himself at the flat, two inch-wide first rung
Of a building’s fire escape. Then he’d cup
The round metal dowels and wallwalk up
Till he had a purchase. Next, he’d scramble
Upward, through the tomato pot bramble,
And well ahead of her roman candle,
He’d flee with Miss Mafucci’s mop handle.

But were we flush, with a dollar nineteen,
A&P broom handles launched a spaldeen
An urban mile. Below burned-off green straw,
Barrels tapered, shafts flared. Sculpted to awe,
And better than the bats of hugger mugger,
The A&P stick was the cityville slugger.

South Bronx born and bred, and attending local schools there in 50s and 60s, J.T. Clark is a retired NYC teacher with fifty poems currently appearing in twenty poetry journals. He penned The Joy of Lex, an upbeat romp of seventy-two sonnets and a crown which tells of life with his black lab, Lex -- the best service dog in the world -- and has also written Othering, a mss of 150 sonnets which recounts the journey of a person who others, who becomes "an other" as he faces a burgeoning physical disability.

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