June 24, 2018

Deadpool 2 fills the theaters. Saudi Arabia allows women to drive. Estonians sing and dance around bonfires in celebration of Midsummer’s Day. Best Buy runs a sale on the Apple Watch 3. The five of us have a picnic —the kids have missed you. Even though they are grown, they’ll always be our “kids”. As though we were still married, I fuss over how thin you’ve become. Severe storms buffet the Texas panhandle. Kushner says an Israel-Palestine peace plan is just around the corner. I have a biscotti before bed. As I fall asleep, I am thinking about the guy who claimed 

on this date the world
will end.
Looks like he was wrong.

June 25, 2018

A Monday. Anthony Bourdain’s birthday, if he hadn’t left us two weeks earlier. Wildfires spread over 8,200 acres in Lake County, California. Mumbai bans single use plastics. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom eats Deadpool 2, sits sated atop the box office. Trump calls for immediate deportation of all undocumented immigrants. Kenny Chesney’s “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright” dominates the airwaves. We get a call from an Officer Bell requesting the family to gather; she and her partner will be here soon.

The moon hangs heavy
in the dark night. Like ripe fruit,
it falls to the Earth.

June 26, 2018

Japan unveils its Hello Kitty Bullet Train. New Guinea announces a polio outbreak after 18 years free of the disease. It is Flag Day in Romania. We four stay in our separate houses, each to our own seeking. Uncle Joe goes to see your burned-out truck, touches the skid marks on the pavement. Ariana Grande turns 25. The Cubs clobber the Dodgers 9-4. In Tham Luang, a boys’ soccer team remains trapped in a flooded cave, rescue dives suspended. 

There is no seeing
through the murky waters
of torrential rain.