Today's poem is by Nathan Xavier Osorio

Empty Stadiums
       

Remember the baseball field,
how you got there so early
the crew still drinking their coffee
before slowly rolling away the tarp

to reveal the damp diamond.
You sat there as dawn
drained from the nosebleeds
illuminating, for the first time,

how you had thinned, how you had burnt
a new hole into your leather belt with the
red hot tip of a flat-head screwdriver
to feel more held in place.

Some of the insomnia was eased
by the highway that brought you
and by its perforated lanes appearing
before so easily disappearing,

by the car's rhythmic thumping
as you drove over the ceramic reflectors
to flirt with the iron guard-rail.
The red and blue sirens splashed

the dashboard's hula girl
until it was nowhere as
voluptuous as you recalled.
But do you remember the floodlights?

The irony of their what seems to be the problem?
exposing the crack where years vanished
into another's night, into the furious
game of following somebody else home.

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Copyright © 2024 Nathan Xavier Osorio All rights reserved
from Querida
University of Pittsburgh Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission