#boudin – Page 36 – The McNeese Review

Mister Average

Mister Average or, A Properly Forged Sword Eric P. Mueller __________ Silence, rare on the football field, usually occurs with gasps, like after the hardest collisions, or, in a moments of loss when the team scores, a player is injured, or you lose the game. That’s probably why my silence…

Mascot

Mascot Beth McMurray __________ My mom had postpartum depression. Not the baby blues type, but the type where she took off and left and went back to Tennessee, to the parts where trailer trash fit right in, leaving my dad and me living in a house atop a liquor store…

Four Fables

An Ekphrastic Fable about Construction Workers’ Breakless 8 Hour Effort to Remove a Racist Owner For Alaina Getzenberg, Charlotte Observer Reporter Alex Wells Shapiro __________ Strapped under the pits, bronzed Jerry Richardson flies away, sloppily offering a football by the nose to passerbys pausing at the spectacle like Jesus’s limp…

Concussion

Concussion Zachary Hughes __________ The weight sits just above, just behind my eyes, Not throbbing or jabbing at me sharply— It just pulls—makes my eyes and head want to sink down— If someone told you to hit your head against the wall over and over, Would you do it? What…

With the Intent

With the Intent Pablo Piñero Stillmann __________ Things were dicey between her & the boyfriend. I was, I guess, “the other man,” even if I didn’t much feel like one. An evening after wasted hours of pre-season football, the woman took me to a party at her cousin’s place. I…

Tough Call

Tough Call Dave Malone __________ When my father reffed high school football games, he kept a mental log of epithets the fans yelled and shared the best over Schlitz with his newspaper buddies on our patio. It was mostly laughs except for the occasional telling after a six-pack of the…

Tecmo Bowl Days

Tecmo Bowl Days Matt Rector __________ before the spastic torment of middle school when an erection was just an uncomfortable oddity and the television had a dial and wood paneling we lost a summer to this game backs hunched thumbs fast legs folded on the floor inside our parents’ living…

Two Poems

Board Drill Peter Hogan __________ On the football field I am a boy crashing against a mountain and being pushed back except the mountain is a man who is the trill of a steel whistle, a full metal jacket, a shepherd in the same sense a hangman shepherds I am…

Double-Sonnet in Race

Double-Sonnet in Race Prince Bush __________ To actively respect difference is activism with adverbVital. Stand, stare, hark and talk up:Verb and direction vital—to peelThe white paint over bricks the colorOf our bones. The wrong languageIsn’t splitting hairs but splits into atrocitiesThat add up to states. Warring. The 49er’s,Named after the…

Poem in Which Darlington Emerges

Poem in Which Darlington Emerges AJ White __________ in Armuchee, in Cedartown, in Bowdon, Ridgeland, Mt. Zion, Gordon Lee— we must have seemed so proud walking out of cinder block locker rooms in our loud, clean purple. Our sweat bands, tacky gloves, double sets of calf socks. The prep swag,…