Amber Waves

image courtesy Magpie Tales 72

Amber waves.
She leans out of the back window of the family truck as it pulls away from the farm for the last time and heads down the road. She's already said her goodbyes to the cows and the goats and the chickens but somehow she feels the need to say it to the fields as well.  So she waves.

Yesterday, as she was helping Mama pack the last of their things, she asked, "But what about the song, Mama? What will happen if we leave the farm?"
It took some time and some figuring, but finally Mama understood. She laughed, then gently explained that "amber" was just another word for yellow. Amber always had thought the song was about her, her family's farm--"Amber's waves of grain." She felt better knowing it wasn't. And worse.

As the truck picks up speed, the yellow and orange hues of the wheat fields blur together into a Van Gogh painting.
Amber waves.

submitted for Magpie Tales 72

Two Alleys

photo by Penny K. Sherman courtesy Bluebell Books

Life is good on Ego Alley*

Lazy days of heat and haze

Sipping margaritas topside

From the Captain's lounge chair

Watching the tourists

Watching you

In your cleverly named boat

While in another alley 

Just a few blocks away

The tourists avert their gaze

While a small boy plays

With a beer can and a stick.

In a puddle of rainwater and piss

He guides his boat around cigarette butts

And a used tampon applicator

Until his mother yells for him to quit.

*"Ego Alley" is a small, narrow waterway that leads to the heart of the city of Annapolis, MD.  It got it's name from the endless parade of boats and yachts that traverse this dead end canal, usually only to see and be seen.

submitted for Thursday Short Story Slam, Bluebell Books

Help Wanted

image source

Families living in cars
Men sleeping on heating grates
     with newspaper blankets
Weary women begging for quarters
     so their children can eat
Fighting with dogs and rats for scraps of food
Nameless, faceless nobodies
Wandering the land of milk and honey
Stepping in sticky, dried puddles of beer and urine
Looking for streets paved with gold
Dying on streets covered with blood

submitted for May Poetry Challenge, unemployment, at Verse in a Nutshell

Gates

image source

                                   

We live behind gates
    in our communities of strangers.                  
We make
     small talk
           with our
               small minds
                    while eating
                         small food
at the annual holiday party.
We roll our eyes over the cheap wine
and boast about how we buy
     organic or
     local.
We hurry back to our
     Fortresses of Solitude
     for another year. We have
          tvs in every room so there's always something to look at
          other than each other. We have
               everything we could ever want.
We live behind gates
     to keep out the undesirables. We deserve
     to feel safe. Is that so wrong?
But what do we do when the fruit is rotten from
     the inside?
          Polish our silver
               and
                   detail our cars
                        and
                             landscape the yard
                                  and
                                       enlarge the pool because our kids are
drowning
in
stuff
but starving for attention
     (at least that's what the psychiatrist says when he hands out the prescriptions.)
We live behind gates
     to keep in the kids.
We don't want them mixing
     with bad influences.
We send them to private schools
     where they can get drunk
          and
               high
                    and
                         carve their skin                  
with a better quality of friends than at the
     local high school and where the
lawyer moms and dads can
     make charges disappear
     if things go really wrong
because they're good kids, not like those others who live
    on the other side, not like us.
We live behind gates.

submitted for Poetry Potluck, Fortresses, Castles, and Palaces, at Jingle Poetry