Tailgate Party

Here’s the first poem from my index card boxes for poems that start with the letter T:

tailgate party—

playing catch

with an empty bottle

This poem came to me on 25 May 1998, in Foster City, California. It was inspired by baseball, so I tried sending it to Fan magazine for their special issue on baseball haiku. They selected other poems of mine (see “Pop Fly”), but not this one. So, I tried sending the poem to Modern Haiku, and they too returned it, also in 1998. I then decided to produce a baseball-themed trifold, and included this poem, even though it was unpublished. Nearly all my trifolds focus just on published haiku, although I hadn’t yet solidified that stance when I made my “Pop Fly” trifold in late 1998 (that was only the third of my trifolds, and the first to feature just my own work where I published the trifold myself).

If I were to write this poem today, I’d probably avoid the gerund usage to start the second line. If you hear it aloud, the grammar suggests that the party is playing catch, when I simply mean to say that I am playing catch. This “ing” problem is mitigated by my use of the em dash to end the first line, indicating grammatical independence, but that’s something you see rather than hear. Not that it’s a large problem, but the issue could be avoided by saying “a game of catch / played with an empty bottle” or “we play catch / with an empty bottle.” Could either of these options work? Perhaps, but they don’t feel quite right to me. Another option might be “an empty bottle / tossed back and forth,” but that loses the surprise of the last line. With “playing catch” in the second line, it’s easy to think of baseball or tossing some other ball, a benign and sporting enterprise, but then the last line surprises with the revelation that one is tossing an empty bottle, and doing so suggests drunken revelry. I’m a nondrinker, but the bottle reference could easily suggest a glass beer bottle, so there’s danger involved. That bottle is now empty, so these tailgate partyers are now likely drunk and rowdy (isn’t that the point of tailgate parties?). They have no inhibition against tossing a glass bottle back and forth, and they’d probably just laugh hysterically if the bottle smashed on the ground. This is a light poem, and I don’t mean Miller Lite.

—29 May 2025 (previously unpublished)