Each April, the literary magazine Hobart rolls out a month-long baseball issue. This is one of the greatest things that happens in the world of literary publishing, or in the world in general, and I look forward to it each and every year.

Aaron Burch and the Hobart crew have been kind enough to include things I’ve written in several past baseball editions. This year marks my sixth inclusion, I think, and I’m quite proud of that. Normally I send over a short story or short essay–and sometimes I participate as part of the “expert panel” for predicting the new Major League season.

This year, however, I wrote a poem. It is my first published poem. I hope you like it.

It is called “Baseball’s Cruel Lexicon.”

It turns out a very short story of mine, called “Snapper,” was one of ten semi-finalists in the Sycamore Review’s flash fiction contest. So that’s neat.

The eponymous fish of the story is a red snapper. But here’s a photo of a mangrove snapper. I took this from a friend’s fishing boat off Grand Isle, La.