Meals on Wheels
To my twenty-year-old self who still doesn’t understand Emily Dickinson poems: find the white Oldsmobile with its velvet seats and smooth door. Drive with your grandmother to take a meal to the house of the blind man, the strings all over his house like a complicated web. Rest one arm on the hot metal corners of their meals, the other out the window. Between what happens…this is the place you should dwell. It is not Death, you can still stand. Fix the gap by filling the thing that caused it. All the dead are already lying down.
Dolphinarium
Three times per day from my balcony in Batumi, Georgia, Beyonce’s Put your hands up riles the crowd for the stars of the Dolphinarium. The one they call Ruby has been ascribed the theme song from Chariots of Fire, a Vangelis album I once owned: when I think of its men in white on the cover and Ruby in her tank gaining speed gaining speed gaining speed, then erupting to thunderous applause, my eyes smart. From my fourteen-year-old music-club-joining, cd-returning self and this one eating sproti, crossing the street for another Borjomi: to Ruby, thanks for another perfect show.
Jamie Lynn Buehner lives on a small island outside Istanbul, where she teaches English at a private university.