10 We brought food and flowers to the new neighbor. She said she was so happy to have found someone who looked like her, here in these quiet streets, leaf- spattered, drenched with pink and white crinkled blooms. We laughed, comparing how our tongues slid over the name of the city, where to voice or glide the fricative, when to energize the sonorant. At the naval station, 14 piers and 11 aircraft hangars; carrier strike groups, submarines making up the Atlantic Fleet. Wind moving through the trees sometimes makes a liquid sound, as though a school of unseen fish is making its way toward the bay. Everything’s a history lesson, a document leaning slightly against the stones, the furniture. Even the rice cooker in our kitchens: what brands our mothers will or will not buy because some are made in a country that went to war with them.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.