After leaving a career in music (classical guitar) because of a hand injury, David Linebarger earned a Ph.D. in English at the University of California, Davis. Currently a Professor of Humanities at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, his publications include scholarly articles on Wallace Stevens and Modern Music, poetry in over 25 journals, and two chapbooks of poems: “War Stories” (Pudding House) and “Bed of Light” (Finishing Line Press). Recent works of creative nonfiction appear in Cagibi and Another Chicago Magazine. A nationally ranked tennis player in his age group, his current book project is a collection of nonfiction prose poems on famous tennis players.
I wanted to be Ringo Starr one year for Halloween. Long hair, girls screaming, rock star. A few years later I wanted to be Borg. Long hair, headband, topspin, rock star. No one burned as brightly for five or six years. The Angelic Assassin, beatific like the beats, then simply beat, burned out, retired at […]
Imagine Lenglen playing tennis in a hidden corner of Antoine Watteau’s Pilgrimage to Cythera. Dressed more lightly than the crowds of spectators in their rococo frills, her body is both concealed and revealed in all its ballet. A breast can be glimpsed or imagined. Lenglen’s every tennis stroke a musician’s glissando or dancer’s glissade perfectly […]
In junior tournaments, Jelena’s ruthless, unemotional. She even cheats on line calls to avoid her father’s beatings. He smacks her with shoes in the head, punches her in the stomach. He wraps her many wounds in words of love/ambition: “prostitute,” “whore,” “hopeless,” “worthless” . . . Jelena’s only 12, keeps rising in the rankings. Fear of punishment […]
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The older ones who knew would stop and watch. The younger ones have almost forgotten. Rosewall’s slice backhand as repeatable, as simple, as breath itself. If you could hit it at 22, you could hit it at 70, at 80. Easy on the body, the mind. Not slice, as most say, but struck almost flat […]
“The tanks came in on the middle Sunday” while Michael and his mother watched television: 300 dead, or is it thousands? Tomorrow Ivan Lendl, the world #1; tomorrow a lone Chinese man stops a line of tanks. At seventeen years old, Chang is 5’ 9,” 135 pounds, a speedy defensive baseliner without enough firepower to […]
Instructions for hitting Kim’s Signature Shot: Do all of this in one fluid motion Artist Bio: (from website at Chicane Pictures) Mark Winter is an award-winning New Zealand cartoonist, designer and film maker and his pen name, Chicane, signifies a deceptive bend. The extent to which the man himself is deceptively bendy is a matter […]
“Venus Williams Is Straight Outta Compton!” Venus Williams is Duke Ellington at the piano. Keep your solos understated, perfect. Let others in the orchestra stand out: the saxophone, the trumpet, Serena. Yet for the first half of her career, it was Venus’s tennis that screamed lead trumpet. All the other women over 6 feet tall […]
You’re a frigging protozoan sitting there. You’re fixing to drown.* In the catacombs of early Christian art, the Jonah story lingers, pointing to an extensive oral history of dramatic tellings and retellings. You start reaching pain levels you didn’t think were there. Heaviness descending over you. It sits on you. The whale crudely drawn on […]
Pancho Gonzalez(s) after Carlos Fuentes’ La Muerte de Artemio Cruz My father’s bare feet, the borderlands. I could beat anyone at marbles. Practice, practice, practice, yet those other kids’ voices never stopped: “spic,” “spic,” “spic,” “wetback.” Grandma said just picture those white folks in their underwear. In LA we lived in a kind of suburbs […]
Note: Like a monk copying manuscripts in the dark ages, I have faithfully copied the following sentences from a source with the strangest of titles: Jimmy Connors Saved My Life, by Joel Drucker.* As I rearranged each sentence into separate chapters of my own making, I contemplated each sentence for a moment, a minute, a […]