Sandra Marchetti is the author of Confluence, a debut full-length collection of poetry from Sundress Publications (2015). She is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays, including the forthcoming Sight Lines (Speaking of Marvels Press, 2016) and Heart Radicals (ELJ Publications, 2016) as well as A Detail in the Landscape (Eating Dog Press, 2014) and The Canopy (MWC Press, 2012). Sandra’s poetry appears widely in Subtropics, Ecotone, Green Mountains Review, Word Riot, Blackbird, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. Her essays can be found at The Rumpus, Words Without Borders, Mid-American Review and in other venues. ---------
Over Sheffield Avenue
I’m playing baseball in the Garden of Eden.
Scratch that. I’m writing baseball
in the Garden of Eden—where old cars
ride street corner curves in our square
city, while vendors hawk peanuts.
I’m writing baseball out of the Garden of Eden.
Clouds sail the blue-gold lake, a tincture
Titian never mastered. Players skim
the surface grass in pinstriped cottons:
blue hats, blue socks, blue numbers.
I’m writing baseball out of the Garden.
I touch the field to liquefy it—
a prism painted deftly on my eye.
I’m writing baseball as it never was,
from a Sunday on which we won it all.
“All that I can tell from here”
~James Galvin
From here the rocks
cause bruise blue
skin; mosquitoes prick
me as I swim in.
A map notes you and I
span 3,000 miles,
pin to pin; farther
we have never been.
A valley unclasps
beyond my hands.
I anchor my skin
above the rocks and slide
in the cooled blue,
an ache away from you.