Ballers 2, the Star’s Monologue 3

By Tim Peeler

Ballers 2, the Star’s Monologue 3

So he puts X=6 on the board,
says I’m gonna show you
how to figure out this problem
and then starts drawing
all this other number stuff;
then pretty soon he’s back
to X=6 at the bottom.
So math is like this I think;
you remember when the kids
all went cruising,
into the downtown,
around the courthouse,
you know, back before the mall.
Now when they stopped at a light,
they would all get out,
run around the car
screaming and laughing,
get back in
when the light turned green.
They would of course be
in different seats,
but it would be
the same damn kids in the car;
that’s how math works.

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About the Author: A past winner of the Jim Harrison Award for contributions to baseball literature, Tim Peeler has also twice been a Casey Award Finalist (baseball book of the year) and a finalist for the SIBA Award. He lives with his wife, Penny in Hickory, North Carolina, where he directs the academic assistance programs at Catawba Valley Community College. He has published close to a thousand poems, stories, essays, and reviews in magazines, journals, and anthologies and has written sixteen books and three chapbooks. He has five books in the permanent collection at the Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, NY. His recent books include Rough Beast, an Appalachian verse novel about a southern gangster named Larry Ledbetter, Henry River: An American Ruin, poems about an abandoned mill town and film site for The Hunger Games, and Wild in the Strike Zone: Baseball Poems, his third volume of baseball-related poems.