Night at the Blue Granary

Flash Fiction 55 version (revised):

Stars light the Iowa canopy with possibility. The granary is blue sadness, but the thriving wildflowers bloom pink. Where else do farm wives go to be alone, except to forgotten and fallen-down places? Kisses, wet and furtive, we ache. Still, we return home to husbands. 

Original version (revised):

Hundreds of stars light up the Iowa canopy with possibility. Surrounded by fallow fields, the dilapidated granary is dark-blue sadness, but the wildflowers, thriving in the late summer heat, bloom in pinks and gold.

Girl’s night out was rowdy at the bar. The two of us danced with local men, who could have been our cousins or our cousins’ cousins, and some were, but no one cares.  Not when the beer is cheap and the men are buying and the band’s playing Cash and King.

We laughed all the way to the parking lot, but as I turned the car to head towards your house, you opened the window and said quietly, “I don’t want to go home.”

The Flight Surgeon

Deployed to Afghanistan from the States, she's the only doctor for a U.S. military squadron of two hundred.

When she's not cursing the clinic hours that her squadron ignores—they drop-in at their whim for Ibuprofen and Ambien—she walks to the Egyptian hospital to scrub-in, pouring bottled water over her disinfected hands for surgery.

A boy has lost his foot to a land mine. They must amputate to just below the knee.

The Egyptian surgeon laughs good-naturedly at the way she stands by his side during surgery. She is determined to help, to get her hands bloody.

He says the word “cut” in Arabic, which she understands. She hands him a scalpel. Good, he says. Very good.

Are you more American or Korean? He asks.

Who do they distrust the most? She wonders.

Portrait: Woman

I.

Water drips in the kitchen.

She slow-sips ice tea and inhales

deep on the butt-end of a cigarette.

Two fingertips pressed to her lips,

she sucks on slow suicide, counts

her days, square patterns on wall paper

curling and unglued at the edges.

The laundry’s undone, dishes in the sink,

the stinking trash holds scraps,

leftover from last week.

She seeks redemption from the summer heat

sticking to her skin, the sweat of dreams

melting ice cubes in her half-empty glass.

Ties That Bind

i.

two women talk and tie colored strings    knotting     unknotting the ends

bowline loop     short-end sheet bend     for unexpected complications

how to connect     one thin piece    to another secure     yet easy to undo knot?

like skilled fingers     knitting learned movements     answers

are known yet unspoken things     which is why

winding conversation is familar to me

they speak of binds     of family and mixed blood thick    

violent as ocean     continental divide     ancestral drift

and the silence

                                    one woman says

I'm tired of living all the hard stories

her past lies as slithering pieces     cut

and fallen     or hanging still from her wrists

she quits the task making frayed parts fit

hard scratch

i.

it begins under your skin

where muscle meets bone

where the elbow attaches to the fist

bone where the fist bone attaches

to the jaw bone it begins under

your skin this itch like a chigger bite

begins so small but burns as you claw-cut

it open you prefer the seeping

wound to the craving that settles

deep and seeps from your veins

infiltrates your brain and burns

your skin your darkness