Meet-cute: a lunch counter pastry case, her sneaker-lace mouth yearning to receive his red-dot kisses.

Theirs is a romance of strong flavors. Not two peas snoring in a pod. Not, “You complete me.” Not even blessed by the stars. Astrological charts, east and west, forecast doom: Rooster and Rat will pulp one another’s hearts; Virgo and Cancer, most likely to bicker themselves to death.

Still, here they are, walking the carnival midway. A roper hustles them into the fortune-teller’s tent. Again and again, the veiled woman passes divining hands over her crystal ball, but the clouds won’t part. She can’t tell if the couple will make it or not.

57th anniversary
coloring outside the times
Loving v. Virginia

*Publisher’s Notes:

Links below were retrieved on 14 April 2024.

1. Chocolate and Maple (oil on canvas, 2001) by American painter and printmaker Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021); may be viewed toward the end of this article by William Eaton in Zeteo Journal (23 October 2014): Wayne Thiebaud at 94
   
   The painting appears to be part of the exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days at Aquavella Galleries in New York from 26 April–14 June 2024.
   
   To learn more about the artist, see also Wayne Thiebaud Is Not a Pop Artist by Cathleen McGuigan in Smithsonian Magazine (February 2011).
   
   
2. “Loving v. Virginia” was a landmark civil-rights decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 1967, which ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States. Details of the case, including audio of the oral argument, are available at Oyez, the free law project from Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute (LII), Justia, and Chicago-Kent College of Law:
   https://www.oyez.org/cases/1966/395
   
   For more about Richard and Mildred Loving, including a trailer from the 2016 film about their story, see the ACLU article:
   LOVING: Looking Back at the Landmark Case, Loving v. Virginia
   
   

Maureen Kingston’s

poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Akitsu Quarterly; Chrysanthemum; Contemporary Haibun Online; Drifting Sands; Failed Haiku: A Journal of English Senryu; Frogpond; Gyroscope Review; Ink Sweat & Tears; MacQueen’s Quinterly; Poetry Pea Journal; Prune Juice Journal of Senryu & Kyoka; Shadow Pond Journal; tsuri-dōrō (a small journal of haiku and senryū); and Unbroken Journal.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Anniversary, a haibun by Maureen Kingston which was nominated by MacQ for the Red Moon Anthologies 2023, and selected for publication in Contemporary Haibun 19