Michael Ketchek was born on July 9, 1954, in Detroit, Michigan, a first generation American of a German mother and Armenian father. He has lived since 1955 in Rochester, New York, except for brief periods in Missouri and Portland, Maine, after college. He received a BA in political science from SUNY at Purchase, New York, in 1977. He and his wife of sixteen years have a twelve-year-old son.
He writes: “I am a daycare teacher, prefer dark beer, go for lots of walks in the woods, and politically am a radical and pacifist. I learned about haiku in the third grade from my teacher in Rochester Public School #46. About the same time, I became a baseball and Yankee fan when I saw Mickey Mantle on TV hit a home run off Barney Schultz in the 1964 World Series. I’m still a Yankee fan though I also root for the Tigers since I was born in Detroit. As a kid we played a lot of softball, often with only three or four on a team. I throw and bat right-handed. We also played hotbox on our dead-end street and in the fall lots of touch football.
“My brother and I would play catch—with grounders and fly balls—and Wiffle Ball in the driveway. We also liked a card and dice game called Strat-O-Matic baseball. My brother and I still get together once a week to play it. (Last week the 1927 Yankees split a pair of games with the ’36 Yanks. Waite Hoyt got a shutout in the first game.) My son and I have gone to see major league games in Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, Chicago, and Toronto. My wife, son, and I also frequently see the local Rochester Red Wings play.”
forsythia
the sound of a ball
striking a bat
summer night radio
thru the dark static
a Pedro fastball
Wiffle Ball—
a windblown home run
over the neighbor’s Rambler
dog days of summer
twenty-three games
out of first
struck out
the long walk home
in the dusk