Hampden Road was where

my street family lived

Franny, Johnny, The Rube and me

mostly ignoring the big kids

Tommy, Eddy, and Big Harvey

who never owned it

like we did

 

Mary Ellen in no man’s land

a tom-boy, a little older

Ruth Rubinson called it disgraceful

to be playing with us

after she’d started to develop,

whatever that meant.

 

The Glendale and Richfield

Road kids went to our schools

but were lame

 

row houses like a big apartment building

connected like rhizomes of different families

hundreds of us with two bookend houses

holdin’ up the rest

 

my house the south bookend

though I had no idea where south

or any other direction was

 

street a well worn trail

alley a weekly rattletrap

ruckus of garbage men

competing with themselves

to be louder than the tension

between my Jewish family

and St. Alice’s church up the street

​

our corner house

with a side lawn,

made me feel rich

to have south windows

​

but the blinds were always closed

‘cept when I, cracked them open

to shoot pea beans on cars

at the stop sign below  

and never got caught

 

 

***

 

 

Life was the street,

the Rube and I

had the thinly disguised

A play, meaning go deep

or the H play, fake going deep

come back short,

 

Step ball, tennis balls

on cement...

you had to get the step’s

corner just right, the ball

would sail to forever

catch sputnik

 

box ball in the alley

pulled us out back,

Got me mad when I was

not picked first

Franny said

this is different, small ball

couldn’t wait to show him!

 

we’d soon be back out front

where a stranger wouldn’t know

to not park his car below Locust Lane

if it was going to snow

cause that hill deposited cars with untimely slides

into third base closer to where home plate

really was, with a wake up KABOOM

 

Once I got a huge shot of status

when the big kids needed one more

football player and asked me in

a game that ended with a loud CRACK

of my left ankle

that I can still hear

 

The adults didn’t get it

They hid behind their churches and

synagogues, thought they were better

than everyone else but it was obvious t

that the real decider, is who won the last

baseball game, even if Mary Ellen was

on our side.