journal

a
fat
cardinal

…

Where do I start?
Reality
For the first time, I put out a bird-feeder and after two weeks of no visitors, the wilds of the Northside found it. Now, I’m refilling it every day.
Each morning, they – some 50 winged wilds – keep me company as I drink my espresso and eat my Costco corn muffin. On a dreary winter morning, their chirping, fluttering, littering, their bickering are all welcome. (Since January 1, Pittsburgh has had 4 sunny days.)

Fantasy
The Roman Church is truly going through a wormhole. Dead Cardinal Pell, who is currently residing in the third ring of the seventh circle, is screaming because The Argentinian is talking about homosexuality. (It’s like a fat priest crashing the dinning hall at Auschwitz. Can’t you just picture it – his mouth covered in cake crumbs, his cardinal-red train fluttering behind him as he grabs his gold pectoral-cross and screeches, ‘Gluttony is a mortal sin; you’re all going to burn in hell.’)

And what about the German Georg Gänswein? Yes, he’s so smart, he writes a book instead of screaming. He screeches, he rants, he scribbles all about a dead Latin rite – OMG. Maybe a train fluttering in the Vatican breeze would settle his Hun heart? What about tea with Cardinal Burke; Leo could wear his ermine collar and bring his ‘train-boy’? No? … Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

…

The above image is shot through a window with a screen, hence its blurry quality. And compared to all the other wilds that come to feast, this Northern Cardinal female is hefty, full-figured.
The featured image is by Kelly Flanagan. I follow her on Twitter.

Though a tremor of the winter

Did shivering through them run;

Yet they lifted up their foreheads

To greet the vernal sun.

…

• the snowdrops are no where to be seen
• on Thursday, temperatures here reached 70 degrees
• in Los Angeles, low 40s are announcing spring
• in Oxford, Michigan the trees are sheathed in ice
• today, the crocus in the back flower-bed bloomed
• a year ago, Putin invaded Ukraine
• but, Americans are obsessed with an asshole in North Carolina, and an asshole in Florida
• the world has gone topsy-turvy

The stanza, to the right of the image, is from The Crocuses by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

17 days
till the vernal
equinox

…

The pots sit ready; the rocks lean left; and the sun is setting on the rich, white psychopaths.

Last year, I got rid of many items – rocks, cinder-blocks, bricks, planks, pots, decorations. But in simplifying, I didn’t have time to organize what was left. This year, with a stripped-down, minimized area, I ordered what remained.

Sometime at the beginning of April, I will fill the pots with violets – the first planting.

art by
Andrea Kiss