Same donkey, different blanket.
Sally Ashton

Same donkey, different blanket.
- Iraqi saying

It wasn't always this way. At the kitchen table. Behind the steering wheel staying to the right. Walk up and down grocery aisles, my cart half-empty. My cart half-full. Unload it onto the conveyor belt, carry sacks to my car, then the kitchen. These things I did and do. Once I owned a fountain and a fence, seven cypress trees, a lavender hedge, a bench. A gravel path and roses, roses the air so heavy the sky itself collapsed. Earth tugged at my feet, my hair grew leaves as if I withstood gravity or sunset. Now nothing remains but this: the dirt beneath my nails, this chair, this floor lamp, and some days above the trees Juanita's ardent bray strange falls or filters, a mote in a chasm, hearing's canyon, to settle or be swallowed the way dust doesn't echo but can occlude the light or make light's passage visible lingering here—life's vernacular, a donkey's dilemma.

© 2006 Sally Ashton