Inch

n.

1. Let’s talk baseball. Let’s talk the atomics of the game. Let’s talk the game itself, outside the
   boundaries of its rules: the spectatorship following whitely, the fields shit-green, shit-verdant,
   the lines of its reaches and conservations. Baseball is for talking, not diagramming. Talking is
   sport, for in talking about what we saw maybe we see it better than we did. I know what I saw,
   and what I saw I cannot look at again, not for another season or two. A bad jump, or a jump
   misplayed, a chance with lost outlines in the lights, foreground slapping against background with
   a rubbery intensity. To win you need to cultivate a certain blindness. You win running on a fuel
   of blindness, all vision pulled down to a single dot by great gulpings of air that tastes both milky-
   thick and like liniment burning. This is why you smear your uniformed self acrid. The ball is
   coming, the ball is going, past mere distance into measure (that’s the cracking you hear, objects
   emerging from probability, spin, into statistics, where they settled or stop rolling, gloved or not).
   We have to talk baseball to save it, glare by glare, from the incessant streaming of its own
   adjustments. Praying hands decline only to trebuchet back into a painfully parallel ecstasy.
   Wands worry. Soft vaults of caps grease themselves with tilt. The ballast of manhood is baby-
   like, moved after habit in cradles, protected out of the way; you keep it from particular exertions.
   Look, and repeat, for any narrative whose outcome depends upon a bouncy physics will always
   invoke a cosmology.
2. The evacuated circus resembles what they used to call a “computer game,” wherein computer
   is not a platform on which to play, a medium, so much as a process, i.e., a game resulting from
   advanced computations, a game rigged by the certainties of math. Numbers with a finite number
   of divisions dividing themselves—warning arrows fired by a hidden archer—from each other.
3. This is what it must feel like to be the hammer that, in Thomist cliches, is caused to fall. This
   is how iron must subjugate iron, leaving it blunt and lusterless.

Joe Milazzo is the author of the novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie, two volumes of poetry — The Habiliments and Of All Places In This Place Of All Places — and several chapbooks (most recently, @p_roblem_s). His writings have appeared in Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Prelude, Tammy, Texas Review and elsewhere. He is an Associate Editor for Southwest Review and the Founder/Editor-In-Chief of Surveyor Books. Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, and his virtual location is http://www.joe-milazzo.com. Here in these definitions in danger are what these words now mean, or might mean, or must mean if they wish to escape the new world incommensurate with the perceptions they’re accustomed to inhabiting.

Eric Lindley is a musician, writer, and artist living in the bay area. His writing has appeared in Fence, Joyland, Tammy, and elsewhere, and other work at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Machine Project, Telic Arts Exchange, The Knitting Factory, and The Smell. With Janice Lee and Joe Milazzo, he co-edited the online interdisciplinary arts journal [out of nothing] from 2009 to 2015. You can find Eric’s work online at https://likeoverflowing.com/