This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and retired professor of English and creative writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
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Welcome to Poetry Moment. I’m Marjorie Maddox
Fishing and baseball: in today’s poem “Grand Slam,” Alison Lubar throws us a curve ball we don’t see coming. To better understand this true story of injustice, consider the context. The author explains, “Jack, my grandfather, was an older teenager in a logging town before he, along with his mother and little sister, were sent to Tule Lake Detention Center during the Japanese Internment.”
Alison Lubar is a queer, nonbinary, mixed-race femme, who spent the majority of their childhood in the Lehigh Valley. They attended Penn for their MSEd and currently teach high school English, Mindfulness, & Yoga. Their first full length poetry collection will debut in October 2024. Visit www.alisonlubar.com
for more.
“We can only break the cycles/we know we’re a part of,” says Alison Lubar in today’s unsettling poem “Grand Slam.” The poem opens with the author’s grandfather fishing—as a teenager in 1939—not with a rod, but with a baseball bat. Through her careful choice of words, the author foreshadows what comes next. By poem’s end, we—unlike the grandfather—understand the parallel between the fish and his own painful experiences.
Here’s Alison Lubar’s poem “Grand Slam,” set in Tacoma Washington in 1939”
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Jack takes a baseball bat
to the river. August spawning season.
The dry rocktops steam
like the belly of a monster cut open.
Unlaces right boot, then
left, pulls them off without sitting and sets
each woolen sock safely
inside. There is no one out sunning today.
Salmon bounce and skip
upstream, suddenly buoyant and silver.
Across the frothing surface,
Jack wades in halfway amidst the frenzy.
He winds up, tight as a fist,
smacks one out of midair toward the bank–
it lands next to his shoes.
Not all hits are lucky. Not everyone is lucky.
Jack knows he’s firstborn-
blessed. Extra pressure to provide as the sole
sober near-adult. A quarry
of four; he will share with his sister. He escapes
hunger and a beating
that night. No one is ever full. When he’s bunted
across the room, it’s so
his little brother isn’t. We can only break the cycles
we know we’re a part of.
He feels nothing for the fish struck out of the air
like a perfect pitch. Stoic hit.
They never see it coming.
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This poem was first published by Cleaver, Issue 39.
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That was “Grand Slam” by Alison Lubar. Thanks for listening. With Poetry Moment, I’m Marjorie Maddox.
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Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
