Thank you Fatimah Asghar for your poem

May 1978 I arrived in San Francisco, the skies, the skies! Words do no justice after the canyons of Manhattan, glimpses of sky in NYC, erupting over the East River from Carl Shurz Park, above the Meadow in Central Park,-a tease like a shoulder bared by a dropped collar.
The sky is blue-gold ice blue shattering my eyes’ perception of skies driving the highways, byways, parkways, freeways from New York City to L.A. to San Francisco.
The Skies
The California skies

The freedom of possibility when I , 24 newly divorced from Bob, my one and only ex-husband.
1973 alone in Greece, 5 weeks, rucksack on my back
Aegean Sea, a blue I’d never seen
1978 California skies the enormity of it driving into my first California sunset
the shimmering glimmering freedom
My initials: SRF
Suzanne Renee Freed Someday Real Freedom endlessly doodling this since
7th grade.

CHAOS LIKE A MOTHER FUCKER writes Fatimah Asghar

AIDS was THE MOTHERFUCKER OF ALL Mothers
When the boymen began falling like trees in a forest
1983
the tumbling
down
began
CHAOS LIKE A MUTHA
Plucking me out of complacency
Life is not orderly and neat
and it is rarely sweet.
AIDS the dirtiest four letter word I know.
First Perry
then Hugh
then Dan
then Steve and Jim
then- O no don’t go there
but I must
then my baby brother Richie
“Richard” he’d correct me
even now.
But then he was only 34 still playing at being “big” brother though he was MY birthday present when I was 3;

Then
Doug and Ira
then Mark
then Rick
then Jim
Richie’s therapist
crushed beneath the weight of clients
dying
brothers in arms
then his long time lover;
Jim, he took his life
gathered it up and left
the planet of pain.
O Pluto you have nothing on any planet
no lock on hell, just stuff it.
Welcome to my orbit
The sign hangs in outer-space
Chaos & Grief planet below
Welcome to the Galaxy’s largest insane asylum.