i. Sunlight reflecting off the shattered glass on the boy’s blue duvet
blindingly attacks pale walls where laughter once resonated between.
ii. A broken trophy case tasting more like defeat than Cleveland 1899
stands where, before, it had been proudly observed like a monument.
iii. He remembers the screaming crowd and the booming stadium—
red dust floating up and settling on mustardy hot dogs like a condiment.
iv. The game had been lost somewhere and someplace between
the first time he had kissed her and the last time he had touched her.
v. How he had traveled to all the bases desperately chasing for her heart
yet the bases were merely diamonds, the batter merely a player.
vi. How reaching each base brought him closer to what he thought was bliss—
the smoothness of her sunny skin, the redness of her salted lips.
vii. It was a better prize than the shiny trophies he stored so preciously in his
unkempt room along with secret letters and ripped envelopes.
viii. Night carries oversized dreams and whistling winds through open windows
when morning seems eternities away and the game still a feat to be won.
ix. The field was haphazardly kept—all uncut grass and cracked diamonds—
so the ball never could quite reach its final destination.
Cindy Song is a rising senior at Richard Montgomery High School. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Cicada Magazine, Words Dance, and National Poetry Quarterly. When not writing, Cindy likes to create oil paintings and take long walks in nature.
