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|  | | A Slight Change in the Weather
THE GAME CHANGES-WITHOUT NOTICE
What happens when your ground beef is an alias? Maybe you make the mistake of wearing Goofy’s Head, or you find a crucified mouse, or a sheep gets loose and sets a whole valley to strange thoughts. Remember those war days passing through Panama, or the ex-boyfriend’s phone call about the pyramid? Rich in the San Francisco oral tradition, these stories talk to us. More often, they sing.
Carole Ann Borges, author of Disciplining the Devil's Country says, “You’re just grateful to be taken along for the ride, to be shot from the coiled spring mechanism of the pinball game of life. It’s a dazzling enchantment while it lasts, and it leaves you rummaging through your pockets for another coin, because in the end you come to know it’s never been the people or the place that count---it’s always been the game.”
Beef I told you about the downsizing. I call it out sizing. I should have seen it coming. The not enough days off, or too many days off. Or because I know for real, that my job may be on the line what with the Pisces FR-9000 high speed fish filleter, that can measure the length of a fish, adjust for the value of the fish, cut and figure out the ratio of bone size to fish size. Who can keep up? Or the TRIO Top Skinner that whips through three hundred fillets per minute guaranteed against split tails and ragged edges. They call it a smart machine. This makes me feel crazy. I won | |  | | Man in a Suitcase
Poems from Family, Love, Work and War
Friday Bastille Day
I drive into the VA clinic
parking lot at 8.43 a.m. Friday
just as WTMI radio announces
Bastille Day, time for the Marseillaise
I whip around the lot four times
squeeze into my parking spot.
and the glory that was France
fills my small car.
I slip the car in Park and pump my arms
singing what little French I know.
I’m marching past the Arc de Triomphe
when in the left corner of my front
windshield I spot a blue pickup
with the words Blue Angel hooked
to the top of the front license plate.
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