from my unpublished collection
The tide is red with the casings of spent firecrackers. Cans and bottles line the beach. Someone emerges to thread through the rubble, bleary-eyed and hung over. A treasure hunter, sweeping the ground for change. Abandoned bits of clothing where the wounded would have been. Where kids ran everywhere, and bicycles and joggers jostled, are swarms of horseflies beginning to stir. Bits of yellow CAUTION tape someone tied around a stand of oaks to mark the turf his family claimed, complete with eating tent, a set of triple grills, and a generator: big daddy, beer in hand. They flutter in the breeze like a line of converts to an Eastern cult. On the boardwalk, two people, old enough to have been married fifty years, walk together arm-in-arm, surrounded by the timeless blue. But look at those ones there: hatred, hubris, and entitlement, our fleurs du mal.
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First published in Prairie Schooner
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images and text © by Alpay Ulku
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