Peter Butler

Neighbors

new neighbors
no sign
on their truck

The letter writing lady claims our new neighbors bowdlerize her prose, leave the floorboards whispering at night, let their scorpions cavort among her roses, and dandelions quarrel with the bindweed by the pond.

We have no complaints. Our neighbors monitor our credit ratings, kindly check our locks and loans, handle all our joint brown envelopes, the wife providing other, more intimate, services at a fairly manageable fee.

Just recently the letter writing lady writes no more, but serenades the mushrooms she's found growing by our neighbors' fence, seated sometimes in her front room window, grinning at her younger self.

She does not understand. Good neighbors are important in Suburbia. They take care of us. They are the future.

magnolias
discomforted
by the breeze