“Maybe it’s just our generation, but there’s always been this constant pressure to actively work towards success, money, or fame… There’s this fear that if you haven’t made a name for yourself by the age of twenty, you’ll never be successful,” says a member of Kindergarten Breakfast, a highschool-based satire band, “And when you’re working with the arts, that pressure is even more extreme. You have to be amazing. You have to be the best. You have to be something the world’s never seen, or it feels like you’re nothing at all. It’s absolutely dreadful on the mind—it makes you feel worthless, it makes you feel guilty if you’re not always working, working, working . . . and it’s exhausting. Oh boy, is it exhausting.”
Amazing.…
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Take the water. Touch it at the rim. The
Amazon. The Mississippi. Flowing east and
south until they empty into the same ocean,
becoming the same body. Springs and
trickles, tributaries bringing wisdom, life, and
over time maturing into continental
waterways, spilling over banks that cradled
them like the darling sips they were.
Fertilizing floodplains to feed the hungry
masses. Turning forests into lakes, where
mystic dolphins twist through roots and
murk, offering fertility—the birth of your
imagination, the future to behold. And the
water knows itself until it doesn’t: delta
meaning change. Then, El Niño, heavy, pulls.
Sucks up the humpbacks’ sighs, and the rivers
once again are cumulus, raining into tiny
ponds a mountain range away, and you pack
the car with everything you need to make the
drive out west, because that is where you’re
going, and this you know for sure.…
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Charlotte was to the manor born, lived that way until her father gambled the family down from mansion to middle-income home to shanty, until her third marriage was to a poor dirt farmer and factory worker. But Charlotte knew her mother was frugal and crafty, so figured her mother had squirreled away as much or more than what her father had squandered. All she had to do was wait for her mother to die, and she would inherit the hidden fortune. Such hope kept her alive, but not long enough
On her deathbed, Charlotte asked her mother how much she would have inherited should she have outlived her mother. Her mother told her “millions”. And next Saturday, Charlotte’s mother went to confession, asked the priest to grant her absolution for having lied to her daughter on the daughter’s deathbed.…
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While on vacation in South America, sixty-six-year-old Angela finally can let go of her daughter Zoe.
Angela and Emilio fly into Cartagena, Colombia, and stay on the resort premises. The end of an isthmus jet out to Cartagena Bay.
Remote. Secluded.
Surrounded by water on three sides. Waves, foaming white on the edges of the brown sea, warm on Angela’s toes. Palm trees, tiki hut, lead-heavy air. An afternoon thunderstorm is expected to cool the air for the night. Zoe, their daughter, would have loved this ferocious sun, cloudless sky. Sunglasses, straw hats, shorts, sandals, fried plantains, sancocho with corn and yuca. But Zoe refuses to join them. Instead, she wants to go camping with Luke. Angela came late to childbearing. Zoe was premature. Angela sets up a ring of fire to protect her since the day she was born. …
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I kept my head on straight and my eyes forward as the march began. My friends and family I left behind, for they were much stronger than I. They could remain rooted to this town, like things that had been planted and had the power to stand on their own means. I was more like the chaff left behind in the fields, never meant to stay on the thing which grew it. I pretended like I left on my own will, but this was a front.
There was no vehicle to draw me forwards, for this was not a time in which such a thing was readily available. Not even the beasts had fallen to the sway of man yet, so I walked alone and long.…
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The cars are meteorites
Streaming forward
They leave streaks in the lane.
I watch, dazed— the colors
They roll slower now—
Through thick silty water
A haze blocking the night above.
Languid, splayed on the riverbed,
Fauna floating round me like
Thin and welcoming hands
Reaching to shield my eyes.
Passersby look onwards,
Fish with their mouths agape.
They inch towards me soundless.
– Cheryl Aguirre…
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from the north/the low clouds float/
single-file/ heading south along
I-75 like a slow army of fluff
it’s late April and snow’s predicted for tonight
i want to be a weatherman in my next life/wrong
or right/you keep your job and there’s no recourse
when i look up/the sky slowly moves over me
and i envision the cloud soldiers in those gray transports
smoking a cigarette/drinking a glass of rainwater/
chewing on hail chips/joking around/saying prayers/pleas
to a silent god to let them live another day
isn’t that what we all want/?/another chance
to get it right or at least not screw it up so much
this time/i won’t turn my back
and walk away without a glance
this time/i’ll tell you exactly how i feel//
i’ll run into your arms and lift
you in the air/swing your legs around/
both of us laughing and kissing and collapsing
in the field
this time/i’ll realize everything///in some strange way///
is a gift
– David James
Author’s Note: The older I get, the more I want a second chance in life—to go back, knowing what I know now, and have a re-do.…
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