A man runs with pink shorts on like a flamingo, and the song “Changes” by Charles Bradley blasts out of a pink hot rod, like a flamingo. Sirens are wailing and pink pigs, like flamingos, are fleeing from their pens. Fire hydrants are bursting & bicycle riders pedal harder. Little white children are telling their mothers they can stand on one leg like a flamingo, and the flamenco dancers that were performing in the town plaza are holding their flamingo pink dresses as they scurry. Mothers fall to the ground and cry as the blood of their children (who were once flamingos) oxidizes into flamingo pink. “The world is ending!” a homeless man blares out of a megaphone. The world is ending– and the color pink will be no more. Concrete grounds lift towards the pink flamingo sky, and only in slow motion did a flamingo pink piece of bubblegum pop, like the guns the policeman would carry to stop the homeless man & criminals from killing. Pink-skinned people drop to the ground, and the world cracks open like a flamingo egg and the man with the pink shorts, the sirens, the pink pigs, the hydrants, the bicyclers, the flamenco dancers, and mothers with their flamingo children all get swallowed up, and the flamingos fly away.
There was a huddle of worms, resting under a dry piece of plywood in my grandmother’s garden. Their brown bodies, which belonged to the Earth, were clustered together like grapes and the whites of their slimy tails latched onto each other like otters to create a life raft, one that prevented them from being carried away by the heavy flooding of the south. The worms found themselves in tunnels like mole rats, and they’re nearly blind, but the worms in my grandmother’s garden are resilient. No fertilizer, no sparrow, no lawn mower can prevent them from inching back into their holes that almost resemble a calyx eye. And even If you cut a worm in half, all sides can continue thriving on their own. It’s something I admire. Whenever I need to feel whole again, I return to my grandmother’s garden. Where I know that resting amongst the brights of petunias and bell flowers, there lies a pale piece of plywood, and there I know I can find the worms again.
