Fruit on Fire

Kathryn Jordan

Stare out the window at the Irvine Ranch, but it’s not a ranch,
it’s the Air Facility hangars for the blimps. It’s 1966.
Like Okies, we drove from South Carolina, where kids my age
wear red Keds and jump rope, to California and kids in fishnets
going steady. My mom wants to get close to Chu Lai, Vietnam.
In his khakis, captain’s bars, Garrison cap, my stepdad kneels down,
puts his arm around me. Take care of your mother, okay? And write.
But what kind of address is NAVACTS COM, NY, NY?
Ride the bus to Nelson Elementary, watch monster bulldozers rumble
like tanks, shoveling orange trees, root side up, into piles to build condos.
Fruit on fire. Nights, I sneak out, pull up stakes around the green grove
next door. I don’t want them to cut down my trees. When I’m grown,
I’ll recall how my mom would always find a house at the end of the world.
At night, Walter Cronkite brings the war into our living room; he looks sad,
like my grandpa, shuffling papers, telling us about dead GIs on stretchers,
pouring sour milk on the cereal of our lives. My mom tries to keep up,
but she goes out at night, I don’t know where. I’m afraid to ask her not to.
She can’t afford to think of what she’s doing to her kids.

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Kathryn Jordan is a retired choral music teacher from Berkeley, CA. Her chapbook, Riding Waves, (Finishing Line Press) touches on life as a military kid during the Vietnam War. A recipient of the San Miguel de Allende Writers’ Conference Prize for Poetry and the Sidney Lanier Poetry Award, Kathryn’s poems appear in The Sun Magazine, Comstock Review, New Ohio Review, and the Atlanta Review, among others. The poem, “Fruit on Fire,” is an attempt to give voice to the isolation, bewilderment, and pain children feel when a parents goes to war. Kathryn’s website is http://kathrynjordan.org/