The Sacred Athletic: A Look At “Sue Bird’s Second to Last Game at Climate Pledge Arena”

There are a few things I must confess before I respond to this poem. One, I’m a man. An ordinary, middle-aged man. Two, I’m not what anyone would consider a sports fan unless you count my unabashed enthusiasm for all things Olympics. But I love poetry, especially when it surprises and moves…or perhaps I should say pivots? “Sue Bird’s Second to Last Home Game at Climate Pledge Arena” by Jessica Gigot is a playful and poignant poem that dribbles past any perceived differences (I swear I’ll limit the puns) and connects us to our idols and each other, whether we’re gym rats or poetry pack rats. (And if you happen to be both, huzzah!)

Gigot’s fantastically titled poem is an imaginative leap into territory both deeply familiar to me (the domestic) and unfamiliar (basketball). The athletes referenced are household names, but I couldn’t tell you much about them. I can tell you more about “deciding between whole milk or 2%, organic or grass-fed” than I could about Michael Jordan or Bird (Sue, not Larry). It doesn’t matter if I’m a fan or not; the poem isn’t solely about the game. What matters is the speaker is a fan. There is an insight we gain, a joy by proxy, when we listen to those who are passionate about their subject. To witness a thing so that the readers themselves could love it? That, I believe, is one of the core missions of a poet, and it is beautifully accomplished here. 

Gigot’s skill as a writer connects the reader in me to the craft, but it’s the clear admiration (“The female body in motion is a beautiful thing. Tough and also tender. Fierce and flowing,”) that pulls the rest of me into this fandom. With Gigot as a sports surrogate, the sacred athletic becomes apparent.  

I also get the nervousness and tension of the speaker, which is palpable even in these fictional scenarios. I swear I felt my palms go clammy while reading this. The speaker imagines anxiously peeling tape from a package at the post office, going back and forth between milk options at a store. Wherever Sue Bird is, the speaker is as well, flustered in a wonderfully endearing and human way. When the speaker answers (“I’d say no, and then yes”) an imaginary question (are you an athlete?) as posed by an imaginary Sue Bird, I laughed. That’s a genuine and genuinely funny moment. That’s a real toad in an imaginary garden. The celebrity encounter, the repetition of the full name—Sue Bird every time—giving her an almost mythical status, juxtaposed with the most mundane tasks is effective and delightful. 

“Show me, Sue Bird, how to live in this body. Tell me, Sue Bird, how do I trust my own strength,” the poet states. These questions are as suited to the athletic as the domestic. These are questions I ask myself when I help my father in and out of his wheelchair, or when I feel my own aching right knee climbing the stairs. It’s a poem about idols, sure, but it’s also about our youthful dreams and aging realities.  

That being said, I’d be doing Gigot (and Sue Bird) a disservice if I focused exclusively on universals and ignored the specifics of audience and gender. How different might this poem read to an athlete, a woman, a young girl rather than a man who isn’t even a basketball fan, for instance? How different the impact of this poem if it were about LeBron and not Bird? Very different, I believe. There’s a power in the specifics, even if I can’t fully speak to them, but with talented writers like Gigot, even someone like me can begin to get it.

Gigot may not be a WNBA star, but she is a remarkably strong poet who absolutely deserves to stand “shoulder-to-shoulder” in her “middle-aged mom athleisure” with any writer out there.

Single Poem Review: “Homework” by Cheryl Pappas

The poem “Homework” by Cheryl Pappas arrives at exactly the right time. I’ve been thinking about the end of my life lately, being an age where the end is easier to imagine than to remember my beginnings. I don’t see a light at the end of this particular tunnel quite yet but Pappas does make a reader consider what may be awaiting them as she herself questions and attempts to finish this existential assignment. 

The poem, much like the title implies, takes the form of a multiple choice quiz and each option attempts to answer the question “What is the end of your life?” It’s an exam the reader and writer cannot fail, cannot answer with any certainty, and cannot avoid. 

This quiz, this call and response, this list, works best when Pappas lets the specificity of an image tantalize (to borrow an absolutely delicious word from the poem itself) the reader. An image like “a tower of alphabet blocks tumbling onto the carpet, again and again” evokes childhood or parenthood, and since we are talking about the end of our lives, perhaps even loss of language itself, a terrifying prospect for those of us in love with words. It’s a cinematic image that conjures chaos as well as playfulness, joy as well as sorrow. Next we read about a “fox on the side of the road” (reminiscent of a particularly powerful scene from the show “Fleabag”) after a long night of drinking and the image is strange and lovely, compelling enough not to need more explanation. Both images lack a certain amount of detail (are they wood blocks? What color? What kind of carpet? What did the speaker drink and why?) but they are unique enough to delight on their own. 

Other images such as “a lost lover” or “a door closing slowly” don’t quite have the same impact, even when paired with a line that is a bit more image-driven. The door reminds me of Louise Glűck’s opening line from “The Wild Iris” (“At the end of my suffering / there was a door”) but “end of my suffering” makes a more powerful phrase to pair with than “the end of your life.” Pappas could have made it a door to a school, an ornate door to a ruined mansion, a plain door in a plain house in an ordinary life. 

The door itself, while closing slowly, could have revealed so much more. 

But balancing the universal with the specific is a difficult task. Ending a poem that attempts to tackle an impossible question is even more difficult. Pappas’ poem may have its flaws but she accomplishes something wonderful at the end and uses just the right imagery: leaves, lines, light passing through. The poet reminds us that maybe we don’t know what the end is but if it’s something as lovely as those last two lines in “Homework,” well, I think I could live with that. 

🍾🍾🍾🔥🔥

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Cheryl Pappas is the author of the flash fiction collection “The Clarity of Hunger,” published by word west press (2021). Her work has appeared in Swamp Pink (formerly Crazyhorse), Wigleaf, The Chattahoochee Review, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere. She is a 2023 MacDowell Fellow. She is currently at work on a novel, which is a contemporary retelling of Hansel and Gretel.

Currently Reading:

“Paris Stories” by Mavis Gallant (“I eat her sentences up!” - Cheryl Pappas)

For More About the Author:

Instagram/Threads: @fabulistpappas

Bluesky: ‪@cherylpappas.bsky.social‬

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Love & the Anti-Occasion: A Look at “In the Dark Room of Too Little Time”

The ‘occasional’ poem can be a difficult endeavor for a poet, and Meghan McClure’s poem, “In the Dark Room of Too Little Time” hastens to confess in the opening lines that she will likely fall short and fail: “There is, of course, nothing new to say about love. / But let this attempt and failure be an act of love…”

The urgency in this poem’s title is what first drew me in. The idea of love as a “dark room” was so perplexing and unique to me, I had to read on to confirm my initial suspicion that this poem was indeed written about marriage or the union of love, and not about a couple on a very high-stakes date at an escape room. 

There’s a reason people reach for poetry at weddings. The occasional poem is one of the most-used romantic gestures, and more often than not meditates on common tropes of love and happiness—(think, the lyrical equivalent of a wedding cake topper). McClure takes a different direction, pointing to a longer temporality beyond the occasion itself, and one that is marked with quotidian details of domestic private life: “you will give morning coffee to one another, / which will inevitably go cold either because bed is more enticing, / or there is a fight to be had about dishes, and both are acts of love.” Like poems, love doesn’t transcend life, but lives in our bodies on earth. Love is often in the microscopic details of the anti-occasion, just as so much of a marriage can exists in one house, and often in one main room. We weather our partners in life just as we weather the seasons, and McClure warns “Winter will stretch too long, and spring will be soggy with rain, / and even summer will burn itself out as ash settles on the windowsills…”  Marriage is work, and love is often unkind—so where do we go from here?  McClure points to love as sacrifice, and through a series of imperative anaphoric lines, (statements that begin with the repeating word “let”), she foregrounds the smaller, more understated gestures: “Let it be an offering. / Let the light fall in stripes across the bed, let the bottle collect // dust for one day, let the cheap candles burn, let the forks be / mismatched and bent, let the wind pick up, let the dark settle.”

These familiar images of domestic disorder coupled with basic, mundane routine is where “love is to be had,” because where is it otherwise? And what is the urgency to embrace it?  If we wait for the right occasion or the perfect circumstances we will never see love in all its ugly, dark magnitudes. McClure implores us to course-correct our thoughts on love just as she course-corrects herself in the poem: “I take it back—dust off the bottle, pour a glass of gold / and raise it to the nothing and the everything and the who knows.” I’d argue that McClure very much has something new to say about love as she writes, “it is here in the kitchen of too much, at the table of too many, / down the hall of too narrow, in the dark room of too little time.” Just as life brings inevitable death, love carries within it the notion of inevitable loss. What else is there to say beyond the beautiful and successful last line:

“My God, it is too much and not enough. Every day.”

Single Poem Review: “After Scattering Ashes in August” by Emily Franklin

There are two words that make Emily Franklin’s poem “After Scattering Ashes in August” worth reading: “hope & errors.” Words brought together by an ampersand, binding them closer as if one could not exist without the other. The speaker is harvesting seeds after presumably scattering the ashes of her late grandmother, and is reflecting on the finite temporality of life, but also the unique ways in which life also regenerates life. The poet writes, “I am reminded / of my grandmother who with her knees in the dirt / told me gardening is the truest form of hope…” 

“Shed no tear—Oh shed no tear! The flower would bloom another year!” Keats would exclaim. But this poem does more than use the trope of flowers as a cipher for human mortality. The grandmother “found hope and errors everywhere / which kept her present…” The word choice “error” is fascinating, because it implies more than common human mistakes. Errors emerge out of a malfunction or misconfiguration of a method or system—in this case, the system of life. When the grandmother found that animals “took up residence / in the driver’s seat of her car where sunflower seeds / had spilled,” she let it change up her daily routine to let the creatures nest in her car and “raise their young”—walking instead of driving until the animals eventually “left without warning.” The lesson here is that we can let “errors” gently reroute us, but also that one person’s spilled seeds can generate more life, just as flowers gone to seed will find use again in the dirt.  

In a way, “After Scattering Ashes in August” reads like a small life cycle of its own—navigating the spaces of becoming and being, and making music with so many of life’s unsung gestures until the final (and single) end stop in the last line. The poem in its entirety is a run-on sentence of continuous thought. Punctuation is minimal, relying mainly on enjambment and a determined avoidance of end-stopped lines to create tension and a sense of constant movement. And just as there’s no guarantee of permanence in life, there’s no guarantee of permanence in a poem. Much like the speaker asking the dirt “to hold what I am taking and make it useful,” a poem lives as long as culture is willing to carry it. 

🍾🍾🍾🔥🔥 (3 / 5 on the Toast or Roast scale)

Postscript:

There is a typo in the fourth stanza: …”because the animals—/ chipmunks, maybe—seemed so comfortable she allowed them run of them (sic) place…” I do not believe this was intended to be the poet’s literal depiction of “hope & errors”, and I presume the line will be revised in time.   

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Emily Franklin is the bestselling author of more than twenty novels and a poetry collection, “Tell Me How You Got Here.” Her award-winning work has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, The Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, and numerous others as well as long-listed for the London Sunday Times Short Story Award, featured and read aloud on NPR, and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries.

“After Scatting Ashes in August” was published in Cutleaf, a project of Eastover Press.

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History & Memory: A Look At “After Watching the Challenger Documentary on Netflix”

There are memories I recall that we collectively refer to as history: watching footage of 9/11 from my apartment in Minneapolis or seeing news of the Berlin Wall as a child. There are other memories, just as powerfully present, that shape who I am with no public discourse (comforting my daughter when her fish died, learning my son had his first kiss). These personal histories are deeply felt yet remain unknown. What Clint Margrave manages to do in his poem “After Watching the Challenger Documentary on Netflix” is brilliantly blend the space between collective and personal histories. He creates a poem that functions as history, memory, and private narrative, all at once.   

The title, simple and direct, leads us in. And it’s not just the title that is simple and direct but the poetic voice as well, which only works if the author has a certain kind of intellectual and emotional confidence in the work. To Margrave’s credit, it works extremely well here. (I sometimes find excessive, ornamental complexity and lyricism in a poem to be the equivalent of a bathroom deodorizer; you know the writer is spraying it everywhere to cover up the smell of bullshit, but I digress…) 

Margrave brings us back to “The falling debris,” The schoolteacher,” and the “sky blue walls” of his sixth-grade class. We are given a classmate who “kept launching / and exploding” a toy shuttle, playground “jokes,” and a time capsule which eventually gets thrown out. 

Retelling a collective memory is a balancing act. To capture what many experienced without cliche, without speaking over people from a soapbox, is a difficult task. I can write about Margrave’s pacing, his restraint, and even about his ability to make common adjectives (little, sky blue) seem like million dollar words by their placement, but the key aspect is the parallels, the pairings (some implied) presented throughout: the disaster and the documentary about the disaster, the toy shuttle and the Challenger, the sky blue walls and the sky itself. The school teachers. The mother and son. History, memory. Margrave takes a snapshot and transforms it into a profound poem. 

Some traumas, some memories replay over and over. Sometimes we are the boy launching and relaunching our toy shuttle to the same awful ending because we can’t fully process any other way. Witnessing changes us. “I’m a little more aware of dying now,” the note in the capsule reads (one which he “hid,” in a drawer, a telling detail). In the end, the mother throws out the capsule “not knowing / what she’d found, / or what” the speaker lost. 

I can’t exactly say with absolute certainty what was lost (innocence, a sense of immortality?) but I believe it’s something we all lose eventually. Isn’t it a comfort to know a capsule of a poem like the one Margrave wrote can give us something back?  

welcome to table for deuce

Welcome to the official Table For Deuce website. We’re your hosts, Kate Hanson Foster & Michael Schmeltzer. Let me tell you a little bit about our project.

Review-centered & humor-forward, Table For Deuce (T4D) is a poetry podcast (AKA “the Table”) and publishing platform (AKA “the Seat”) whose aim is to highlight poetry and create honest, thoughtful, and dynamic engagement around art.  What started off as a simple podcast between friends is evolving to be a hub for honest discussions, thoughtful reviews, and dynamic poetry.

Our website is a centralized location where you can find all our podcasts, the wonderful work we publish via our journal The Seat: Poetry & Reviews, as well as our blog which will feature various updates and reviews (including single poem reviews) written by us.

Although we have a steady post, publication, and podcast cycle, you may notice we don't do standard journal issues. We want to create a more meditative, focused publication style to combat the hectic nature of social media. Every poem and review we publish deserves space to breathe. They deserve the undivided attention of our audience, and at the very least, our extended attention as editors. We do our best to provide that by publishing one piece at a time and sharing it numerous ways.

We hope you say, explore, and enjoy what you find here. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even discover some Easter Eggs from time to time hidden in an author bio or in a blog post…

Welcome everyone to Table For Deuce.