from my unpublished second collection
1. Lebanon, Nebraska
1.
She stares through the window to the garden gate, guarded by Thunderbirds, one on each side, the road
leading out to the highway. I'm waiting until I don't love you, she answers. Puts her cup on its hook. Impossible to dry anything. Dishes, clothes. Her cheek
where the cat licks it clean. So much life other than our own loves the heat, the close nights crackling with starlight, you'd think we would grow fond of it.
You'd think the locusts screaming from the trees, the alien sea everywhere, fecund and vicious, would make us grow fond of each other,
time running out like air from a tiny hole on a starship adrift in the darkness. So sad to grow old without family.
To face your own extinction without hope, or any accounting or appeal. So sad to love and not be loved even a little in return.
2.
Therefore, Beautiful-Unbreakable, you’d think we’d break. What are you? What crackles so brightly we can’t even see it?
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First published in Ploughshares as "Transatlantic"
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images and text © by Alpay Ulku
