©Outside My
Window
Mona Arizona, May 2014
Mimi Wolske - Mona Arizona™
All Rights
Reserved
Reclining
On the sofa Friday
in the early morning hours
reading, unable to complain of fatigue,
feeling shrouded in a kind of
ineffable numbness
after hours of sensual words
spoken to me by him—words that offered
both of us pleasure while we were apart;
the heat outdoors returned and the
prevailing silence was disturbed by
an unrecognizable noise.
It was close;
I grew nervous.
Diversity
was a politically correct description
for this neighborhood;
but diversity had gone downhill
in the years I'd lived here.
There would be no lamenting about boredom
when frightened fathers from places like
India, Pakistan, Iran, and Japan
gave up their homes and moved
their families some place safer. The single Caucasian
mother who moved in across the street
when the sky was wide with blue,
lived there less than one month—
she fled during a work-week day due to
changing reflections and more menacing nights.
Speed Bumps.
They were new within the last month.
They're narrow.
They're too high;
they scrape the bottom of
low-riding cars...
and regular cars and trucks if they don't slow
down.
Next year, school buses will no longer drive up
the streets
to pick up Hispanic and Black and Caucasian
boys and girls.
Pizza and Chinese food
delivery guys and gals complain.
They'll probably stop their deliveries—
Wonder how many people will complain.
Surveillance
and police road blocks became weekly events.
Clouds, scantier and less menacing than the nights,
frolicked endlessly, changed shapes.
Curious at first,
I looked out my windows
as if I had no other options,
too afraid to step outside the door,
too afraid I'd get caught in the
vault of heaven due to some
New-Day-Wild-West gun fight between
the law and the banditos of the new "Hood."
Walled,
my yard was a prison with a glass door
to the house
and a gate with a Master lock to
protect the garbage can kept there
(because no one wanted it
in the garage in this heat)
and the glass door with its weak lock.
Birds came to life and coyotes disappeared
at sunrise on a day when
merciless heat returned with a bang.
A large footprint in the gravel border
made evidence someone jumped the
gray, six-foot-cement-block wall
to get into this prisoner's yard—why?
Dismantled...
that was how I found the doorknob
of the front door—which faces a main road
that is actually a large circle around the
"Hood".
It came apart in my hands
when I tried to open the front door.
The heat was almost as murderous
as the battle ignited by a
new kind of burn from the
fearful sweat that streamed
into the fissure of a recent wound.
The infamous "They"
jammed the garage door opener, too.
Maybe I came home just in time;
nothing was missing, but things were moved
around.
Sand stones tipped with the promise
of death surrounded me in disguised form.
Shadows,
silhouettes on the wooden blinds,
figures back lit by the streetlight
in the early hours of the morning,
as if I was watching a film noir,
rippled as they moved to one side outside.
Inching closer, I halted my progress,
stood on the opposite side inside.
A solitary finger slid slowly
between two brown slats
like a surgical blade but
emotionally stilted between
languor and vigor, it nervously and
twitchingly lifted the slat resting on it.
Voyeurism
was not my intention when
I watched my Hispanic neighbor
push a woman against the side of
his car and kiss her
while his hands strummed
her ass, which overhung nothingness
at least a foot out in the air.
When they moved to her belly,
her groans were musical and
I wondered if the two of them would
break into a cabaret number any
moment just to surprise me.
Then, two hands climbed and conquered
the crippling size of her breasts
like some mountaineer looking for
points to stick his flags.
His body oscillated; his hands slid
down to introduce themselves to
to her gyrating mound.
I turned away before they
opened their eyes and
turned to see the off-kilter slats of my blinds.
Slinking
back to the couch with my own
hedonistic thoughts and desires,
I tried to dash away desperate
wishes for my own guy
to make another phone call,
and picked up my book.
But I couldn't read...
the silhouettes continued their
sexual ballet on my blinds
and my body was responding
like some deserving candidate
for some prime role every girl wanted.
It would have ended sadly if
I hadn't made my presence known.
I went to a lamp and turned it on...
one more light from inside
and the shadows jumped
outside my window.
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