Tuba Luba
At my wife’s grandfather’s
retirement community,
there’s a woman who goes
by the nickname
Tuba Luba.

A kind and
generous woman, Tuba Luba
once invited us all over
to her unit
for a home cooked dinner
with lots of wine
and beer.
She even gave our kids
toys to play with
so we could concentrate
on more important things

—like getting drunk.

“Parents need to
kick back and
relax,” Tuba Luba winked,
handing my wife’s grandfather
another ice cold can
of Bud.

Though quite curious, my
wife and I never asked
Tuba Luba her real name,
feeling it would be
impolite to pry.
But
later on,
when my wife asked her
grandfather
how the woman got such
an unusual
moniker,
he smirked and said,

“Because
—that’s what it takes.”

“They’re after the place. They don’t know why, they just remember. Remember that they want to be in here.” — Dawn Of The Dead (1978)

Laundry In The Time Of COVID
Eight months into this pandemic,
I sometimes wonder if anyone
bothers to fold their laundry
anymore.

Spending all our
time at home and
not seeing many people
besides one’s family makes
the chore seem pointless.

I mean, who has time to worry
about neat, wrinkle-free clothes
when there’s an apocalypse going on?

In my house
we’ve taken to leaving the clean clothes
in the laundry baskets and
digging things out as needed.

Sometimes I’ll get up and fold, but
on these rare occasions
I can’t shake the feeling that
by performing this task
I am no different than one of those
zombies
from Dawn Of The Dead
who mindlessly return to the mall,
so enslaved to consumerism
that the habit of shopping endures
even after death,
performing actions that have somehow
been rendered even more
useless
than in our previous lives.

Alan ten-Hoeve lives in the woods. He has work forthcoming in Close To The Bone. Twitter him @alantenhoeve