Ricky Garni Is Blonde With His Liar of a Grandmother Building Caskets in the Laughing Cosmos

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.