TWO SPRING ROLLS FOR STARTERS

In sympathy 

and solidarity 

and neighborliness 

I’m going to go up the street tonight 

and get take-out from

the Asian restaurant.

I’ll use the chopsticks 

I bought online a few years ago.

I’m just OK with them. 

My kids can

use chopsticks easily.

FDR’s WPA initiative included women librarians on horseback with saddlebags filled with books to take to the outlying parts of Kentucky. It’s a cool story:

https://www.adventure-journal.com/2021/03/mounted-lady-librarians-rode-the-hard-miles-to-deliver-education-and-joy/

Here’s a New Yorker piece on a guy and his bookstore in Kansas. He wants stores like his to survive against Amazon’s big power. He wants us to know the story of the bookstores and the other independent stores in the battle:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/a-kansas-bookshops-fight-with-amazon-is-about-more-than-the-price-of-books

THE LAST DANCE

They picked which 

college basketball teams

will go to the big dance

tonight and

I watched it at home

while I ate pizza from down the 

street.

I used to go to taverns up the 

street

to watch all the sports.

I’d see who got picked or who 

won or lost and then

read it

tens of times during the night as 

all the names and numbers 

scrolled endlessly across the 

bottom of the big screens right in

front of me 

at the bar. 

I don’t drink pints anymore.

I saw the different scores 

the same score

too many times.