THEY’RE PLANTING TULIPS IN KHARKIV By Andrew Hidas The news tells us of mass tulip plantings in Kharkiv, just one more Ukrainian city bringing new definition to the word “beleaguered” in this long spring of horrors. I picture those tulips tightly clutched in fists, shaken and ascending to the heavens as an ultimate “Fuck you!” to the bomb-droppers and missile senders who become blinded by the color explosion of tulip petals hurled aloft in anger, defiance and hope—blessed, dubious, inexplicable hope. In our front garden the other day, the world’s most purposeful sparrow…
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The not unpleasant smell of rotting fruit alerts the senses when one ventures into my backyard on these early summer days. “Our time is now,” that well-known maxim exhorted by coaches in pre-game locker rooms across the land, is nowhere more true than among the two prolific plum and pluot trees in said yard, which, like some urgent stream after a storm, can’t expel their bounty fast enough. I need a crew available at my immediate beck-and-call to scoop up the falling flesh that relitters my yard every day, no matter the removal effort that left it clear just hours…