Armenia Turkey

our fruit of choice

How much?

Motor scooters whiz by at startling speed, weaving among pedestrians carrying their food shopping. Graffiti of Maradona, the soccer star, covers most walls; garbage bags are piled high. Just up the block I can see shirts and sheets hanging on lines outside apartment windows. 

I remember all the years she scolded and criticized and dismissed me, all the headaches she blamed on my lack of care, and how I foolishly thought three generations of women walking a forging city together could stitch back forty years of tear.

I cry all the way home

Dutch elm disease

I once came upon a woman

kneeling at a tree near a stream

filling a paper bag full of mushrooms,

wide-eyed, in the throes of a

black trumpeted moment of discovery.

Keeping House

Aligning accuracy

They want a dream to borrow…

Sometimes it gets to you

I love the grocery list’s role in illuminating the narrator’s desires for luxury; but what are the roots of this underlying need? Is it a need for stability that her mother’s abandonment denied her?

Last night she saw the glow of the fire to the north, to the east. She heard the cries of her neighbors, their panicked voices, their cars starting and revving; she stayed low, peering out the window as their taillights were swallowed, consumed, and she was left alone. Now, an eerie silence lies over the bungalow court like a blanket, the sirens and whirlybirds and chainsaws far enough to be fantasy – dreams, perhaps. Because surely none of this can be real.

One might have a wingdream of love or of escape…

…someone stuck all their nasty lawn flags touting the narcissistic conspiracy fake news guy right next to the property line

on entering the second half of life

The Stone

The sky is the color of cement, and life is at a standstill…

I had enough common sense to recognize unchristian behavior when I saw it and enough theological training to understand the Fundamentalist flaws that drove it.