Volume 14:4, Fall 2013
Prose Poem Issue
Letter # 4
Dear Micky,
How can you go to the park? Do you remember the colored kid Pumpsie Green? The Red Sox was one of the last clubs to hire your people. I know. I got contacts in both leagues. We had a deal to bring in some Cubans but Fidel spoiled that. Now Micky stay away from ballgames and the autobiographical essay. So many folks writing them and not hitting their weight. If you just want to go to the game for a beer and a cap let me know. I try to keep everything cold. Once, Ted Williams kept his bat in my freezer. Kid got three hits the next game. They said he was the greatest hitter but no one ever knew about the icebox. You have to be real cool to hit .400. Now Toni Morrison she has speed just like that boy Jackie Robinson. Beloved I call both of them. God I can still see him stealing home and Milkman falling back to earth. God Micky, why dont you just read instead of sitting behind third base. Wave the other poets home the next time the World Series hits Boston.
Don Millo
Letter # 8
Dear Micky,
Third base is where the IRS never looks. Many of us in the family had box seats. Even for the Series in October. You want to know why we never let the coloreds coach third base? We come to the ball park for space Micky. Nobody was playing baseball in Africa.
Its American like pie and the flag. Talking about the flag you remember that guy who got hit in the face many years ago in Boston? Well, I found out he was a Met fan. Micky- the guy was running across a Boston street like Mookie Wilson and nobody gonna take a shot at him? This is America Micky. Thats why I support funding for the arts. I want to paint the best baseball diamond and bring in performace poets to pitch. You can sit next to me near third Micky but bring a glove. I only raise my hands to write.
Don Millo
From the series The Fictional Letters of Don Millo written to the Colored Poet Micky at the end of the 20th Century as discovered by E. Ethelbert Miller.
E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and the author of two memoirs and several books of poetry. He hosts the weekly WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and hosts and produces The Scholars on UDC-TV which received a 2020 Telly Award. Miller’s latest book If God Invented Baseball (City Point Press) was awarded the 2019 Literary Award for poetry by the American Library Association’s Black Caucus. https://searcharchives.library.gwu.edu/repositories/2/resources/367