COZY IN A NO CRIME TOWN

For a nickel, the town bus took me
on the circuit from home to shopping and back
with a furtive stop at Newberry's to buy
pink-toned chapstick, forbidden to me.
There's the curb on which I sat with Jan
to smoke my first and last cigarettes,
both of us stumbling home overcome
by toxic fumes. Ahead is the theater parking lot
where we waited for show time in the bed
of Carlson's pickup, truant from
Sunday night church, justified after all
because it was The Ten Commandments.
No killer on a rampage or crazed drug addict here.
My hometown boasted it had no crime.
No hurricanes, floods, or earthquakes, either.
An idyllic setting, a comfort then and now.
I savor the soft familiarity of the old neighborhoods
the sagebrush studded sands,
barren winters, and summers so dry and hot
the grasshoppers roused only when I scuffed
the dusty brush with my graying Keds.
Now houses stand where orchards grew
cherries, deep purple plums, and apricots
left for the picking, abandoned before harvest
when the government gave farmers only days
to vacate for the war effort.
We're sandwiched in cozy now -
to the north along the sonorous Columbia lies
the most highly radioactive site in the country.
Plumes of tritium advance in the groundwater.
To the south, across the Horse Heaven Hills,
on which tall wind turbines pulse,
one of the largest chemical warfare stockpiles
in the world burns and burns and burns.

Irene D. Hays
Email: IreneHays@aol.com