Kites on the Coast

Sometime not long after this war had started, after the demonstrators had demonstrated then gone home (their cardboard protest signs in the recycling bins), after the manufacturing boom in Taiwanese-made American flags and Chinese-made American flag t-shirts and Mexican-made American car flags and car flagpoles and Malaysian-made Made in America pendants, you find yourself on the coast lacquered with 30 SPF and patting your hair down, over that bald spot, and pulling your shorts up almost to your belly button, over that embarrassing albino bulge.

Kite-flying looks like fun, rather relaxing even. You turn to the person next to you—a lover, perhaps, or a spouse that you remember once loving—and say: “I think it’s the sound I like best.”

You mean that one kite there, wanting to dive, to dive, to dive for the sand— rippling, wind-torn, angry almost.









S. Asher Sund's work has been published in Margie, Mississippi Review, Briar Cliff Review, Juked, Fringe Magazine, and many other journals and magazines. In 2005, he won first place in the Marjorie J. Wilson Best Poem Contest, judged by Joyce Carol Oates, and in 2006, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Southern California where he writes and produces music with Andi Starr (www.andistarr.com).
(Photo courtesy of Michael Demkowicz)