BLONDE
The
first man on earth must have been a blonde.
Working
outside all day long will do that to your hair.
And
there was no inside then. My grandmother, who
worked
on a farm, was also blonde until the day she died.
And
until that day, she worked hard with the cattle and
the
horses and had sinewy muscles of steel. At night she
would
drink barley wine and dye her hair grey. She wasn’t
my
real grandmother. Yet her hair was as beautiful as her
muscles
and my lies.
CASKETS
I
build little caskets for everything. Birds I see in the sky, donuts I find in
the trash bins, people I barely remember. I even build little caskets for
caskets. And caskets for their little caskets.
THE
VERY OLD TV SHOWS
Sometimes
only a few people would applaud. Sometimes only
one
person will laugh. You don’t know who they are because
you
never see them. There is always a chance that you know
their
grandchildren. Or that you once saw one of them on
a
bus and thought, “My, how old she is!” Her laugh sounds
the
same on a bus as it did on TV. It seems like she can
laugh
anywhere. She is laughing on the bus. She was perhaps
laughing
this morning as she walked towards the bus.
Perhaps
one day she will laugh in outer space, watching
an
old TV show that no one else laughs at. Smoking a cigar
like
crazy old laughing people often do in the cosmos.
Ricky Garni was born and raised in Miami and Maine. He
works as a graphic designer by day, and writes music by night. His work is
widely available in print, on the Web and in a number of anthologies, and has
been nominated for the Pushcart Prize on six occasions.