photo_camera by Photo by Breno Assis on Unsplash
The Stars and Stripes
Wave over Republican garages.
Millennials wait for urges
To go off in their heads
Like kitchen timers
Warning the boiled eggs are done.
I prefer Sunday morning omelets
Cooked in a fry pan over low heat.
A childless neighbor pushes
A pair of Russian Blues
In her baby carriage,
Wheels churning a sidewalk
Decorated with colored chalk.
Mister Dickey and his thin wife
Fill a U-Haul with sheets and trinkets
Preparing to be ghosts.
A green bikini brightens the dead lawn
Behind a cookie-cutter house.
The lizard-skinned mistress
Mists arms and legs with vitamin water.
Last night, her lips confessed
Imaginary sex
With a film noire actor.
We wrinkle our weekend selves
With cigarettes and sun.
Blue veins nourish my pudding muscles.
Love? As difficult as
Forcing blossoms from the bush.
Kirby Wright was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is a graduate of Punahou School in Honolulu and the University of California at San Diego. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Wright has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is a past recipient of the Jodi Stutz Memorial Prize in Poetry, the Ann Fields Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Award, the Robert Browning Award for Dramatic Monologue, and Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowships in Poetry and The Novel. BEFORE THE CITY, his first poetry collection, took First Place at the 2003 San Diego Book Awards. Wright is also the author of the companion novels PUNAHOU BLUES and MOLOKA’I NUI AHINA, both set in Hawaii. He was a Visiting Fellow at the 2009 International Writers Conference in Hong Kong, where he represented the Pacific Rim region of Hawaii. He was also a Visiting Writer at the 2010 Martha’s Vineyard Residency in Edgartown, Mass., and the 2011 Artist in Residence at Milkwood International, Czech Republic. His futuristic novel THE END, MY FRIEND was published in 2013. He published SQUARE DANCING AT THE ASYLUM, a collection of flash fiction, in 2014.
