By Joshua Boettiger
Featured Art: “Field Within a Field” by Thad DeVassie

All the great middleweights. Hagler–Duran, both times.
Sugar Ray and the HitMan. Duk-koo Kim dead in Vegas
after being knocked out by Ray Mancini.
Ten years old, waiting by the mailbox every Thursday.
Marcus Allen, the last of the balletic backs, glides past
the Washington secondary in Super Bowl XVIII.
The Swimsuit Issue in February—Christie Brinkley
at magic hour in Captiva, a sky of seagulls.
Night games in the graveyard with the Hogan kids.
They call it Smear the Queer. Their father drives a Cadillac,
stares at me when a ground ball goes through my legs
and I mutter, Jesus Christ.  What’d you say, son?
I go on Mike Hogan’s paper route with him. The last stop
the apartment of the man with elephantiasis and the sour smell.
We go up the narrow stairs silently then hold our breath,
take turns walking in and handing him the paper.
Touching the sacred while it is still in motion.
Kim and Mancini fought as lightweights, both 5’6’’.
They stood toe-to-toe and pummeled each other for 14 rounds.
Mancini would later say, “I knew him better than his mother.”
After the fight, having just heard that Kim might not make it,
Mancini is brought by his handlers to Sinatra’s late show
next door on the Strip. Between songs the spotlight finds him
and he stands to applause, raises his right fist weakly.
Sinatra waits for it to quiet down, says, How ya feeling, champ?

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Joshua Boettiger’s poetry has appeared in the Missouri Review, The Southern Review, Image, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best New Poets and was a recent finalist for the American Poetry Review’s Gerald Stern Prize (2025). Boettiger lives in the Hudson Valley of New York and is the Jewish Chaplain at Bard College, where he also teaches.