Like Harry Potter, the sorting hat (my mom)
has placed me in a ******, crimson colored school.
It’s disorienting, as I go about, the logos are wack.

Poor little rich girl
no beachside lovers
this interminable, scorching summer.

I’m swept up by scholastic spirit.
Can you hear it? Cause it’s deafening me,
on this cool, dry, Boston orientation day.

As we finished our morning 8k jog,
the sunrise blossomed, painting hot lava clouds
with hues of yellow, orange and pink.

We’re traipsing unfamiliar paths,
it’s not what we’re used to, the roads are uneven
and the architecture’s all boxy and wrong.
.
.
Songs for this:
New Toy by Lene Lovich
Better After All by Jonatha Brooke
Now At Last by *****

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Arthur Benjamin Franklin: my Unca Artie, my favorite. A High School football star, known as Red Franklin, he was famous for his dark red hair.  He used to chuck me into deep water at Chrystal Pool to terrify me for 5 seconds, then hoist me onto his broad shoulders.I suspect I was his favorite too.  War came and he had to go.  I cried and cried on the herringbone patterned bricks at the train depot in Kelso. I have a v-mail he sent to my mom, his sister, dated 1942.  He was a belly gunner on the B-17’s that  were flying the area where Rommel was fighting.  He brought my sis and I back little leather suitcases, tooled in wonderful designs by a skilled artist somewhere in the orient. I still have it.  A treasure.

Grover Cleveland Franklin: My suave uncle, joined the Navy in WWII and became a deep sea diver. The kind that wore those heavy suits with the big glass bubble head.  He helped detect and destroy mines around battleships.  In doing that brave work he lost his hearing and came home as a lip reader for most of my childhood. I was always  a bit suspicious because he seemed to read lips so well. He even got written up in the newspaper because he could sing while putting his hands on a phonograph and feeling the vibrations of the music he couldn’t hear. We kids would always try to make loud noise behind him but he never once reacted to it.
Many years later I learned that he confessed that his hearing had gradually came back.  He was a hero nevertheless.

About their names: Both being born in North Carolina, back in the 1920’s it was common practice among the country folk to name sons after famous people.  I also have another distant relative named George Washington Franklin. I love having hillbilly DNA.

to lie on the warm sand at twilight
ripples of fleeting light
across a calm sea.

The memory of leaves heals me, but first I had to detonate the emptiness in my mother's gaze. Today this me summons all dreams for a clinical examination. Life must move forward to the confrontation of  horizontal and vertical truths: the tenderness of growing wheat, the serenade of aging. The innocence of my hands denounces its longevity. I split my days in two: countable and uncountable or dreaming and nondreaming. I suffer this continuous birth:  words invent me like an age without history. It must be said though: a historical smoke comes out of them. On a day like this beauty is tough, I speak with a seemingly exiled tongue. No return for dreams disguised in blind storcks.
When I look around I see all the way to New York or Cape Town how this world is oppressed by an aboundand impatience to find the point of no return for the sea level. I see the future where I never existed. Our own shadows crush us but we blame it on the sun's karma. I blame everything on love's echo.

.

can you save him?

Can you save him?

A few short weeks before he’d
tattooed Isaiah 40:31 on the
back of his tricep

I  missed all the signs—
his little sister is getting married in a week.

It’s been five years and
It’s been five years and—

It’s been five years


And.

The sun has her heart on setting, and so takes an impetuous bow.

The mountains open trees like umbrellas, to which their budding wildlife gather under.

High above the lamplight district, a cluster of crows assemble on a wire, taking a vote over which direction to take wing.

The grumpy locomotive steams ahead, hissing at its schedule and the possibilities of further rust.

A lady of style, turning on her heels from the salon, swears to the heavens she'll get even if anything ruins her hair.

And you, just this morning...

waving goodbye to me from an upstairs window with a smile, but silently praying I will return to you alive and in good health.