Fall
Sun shines through gray, hazy clouds and slants gold off slats of old siding. Old siding with new paint. Moving vans park under mottled shadows from the canopy of my tree-colonnaded street. Fewer children, fewer families every year. Only expectations high off fantasies of the adventure of city memories trapped in amber, the color of rusty pine needles on the ground. New faces, none that resemble yours, plant desert shrubs in gentrified gardens. Both plant and planter seem out of place until, one day, ever spreading, they aren’t and you are. Your leaves on the ground, dry and brown, dead, dying, quickly. But you digress. You walk past a door hung with a wreath of autumn roses, orange and gold. Pretty, plastic, fake. A synthetic thing that looks good, mimicking the organic but void of life. Never dying, sure, but never living. A metaphor, perhaps, for this new created place being built around you. While the place you once lived falls in dead husks around you. Yo