Book Titles found poem

Pride and prejudice in cold blood

To kill a mockingbird and one hundred years of solitude

The brave new world of the wide Sargasso sea

The great Gatsby, the go between

The grapes of wrath, 1984

Dracula the lord of the rings

Catch22, the illiad

Death in Venice, the age of innocence

Middlemarch, another country

The wind in the willows, the art of war

Of human bondage- women in love

The castle, bleak house

Lord of the rings, portrait of an artist as a young man

Heart of Darkness, under the volcano

Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance -hard Times

serendipity

a short Vietnamese lady chats me up

as she cleans my feet, trims the nails,

finally asks if i want a polish.

i say number 88,

she smiles and says,

i like that one too.

we talk about her childhood

in Da Nang province and

growing up in a small village

with brothers and sisters,

many cousins, many aunts.

she expresses sorrow about Afghanistan

and i say nothing,

the old, white middle-classed male

frozen in place.

fingers too?

and i smile, faintly, suddenly

aware of my place, my own

mortality.

number 88? very pretty.

Karen’s and various women

stare briefly,

the giant man with sparkly

blood red finger- and toenails,

an anomaly in any situation,

shuffles out the front door.

i sit at home, watch Afghanistan collapse,

watch men, women, and children flee

for their lives, watch people fall to their deaths

from the sides of American transport planes.

from under my sink i retrieve a bottle of

nail polish remover, lock the front door,

watch ghosts hover nearby, as the images

on my television

never change.