Member-only story
POETRY
The Walk
We’ve been carless
for about a month.
I’ve been walking, biking,
bumming rides.
I walked to the in-town grocery store yesterday.
There are no sidewalks,
hardly any shoulders,
but I made it.
There’s a big hill.
I passed a dead skunk,
got a few rocks in my right shoe.
It didn’t kill me.
The neighbor’s tan Subaru
often sits in the driveway.
I’ve begun to notice things like that.
I feel a little resentful.
He offered me a ride once
when our paths happened to cross.
I politely declined.
Walking home on Memorial Day,
I saw two women exit their cars
and meet in a parking lot
before entering a gym.
Let me say that again.
They drove separate cars
to work out together.
I am starting to feel insulted by
those pretty blue and yellow annual plants
that people pay good money
to hang in a plastic bucket.
Our schools, our towns
pay real money on decorative plants
when they could be planting food.
In Sicily, orange trees grow in the streets.
Olive trees grow in the streets.
