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It happened one random day,

and nobody noticed.

Whatever last shred of memory of you

he still carried, blew away with the breeze.

For him, you returned to a dark room,

an unknown. Just a puff of smoke

scattered into wisps,

before disappearing completely.

For awhile, he spoke of you

as if you were still here amongst us.

You were just a few houses down the street

as best his mind could tell.

Next, you became a photograph,

someone he would point to and feel

a zing of connection.

It stayed that way for a bit

until you took your final form

as a concept, something he was supposed

to have, a grandfather.

You became someone other people knew.

He now has a web of other people’s

memories, but none of his own.

Not even your mustache,

with its bushy walrus bristles that he’d

reach for, remained. I was certain it

would have imprinted on some open prairie

in his growing toddler brain.

But one day, it all vanished for him.

The memory of you was gone,

before he even realized it was there.

He has grown to be a good man.

He cares about people.

He is the last egg to hatch, slow to

make his way to the edge of the nest,

while others have already taken flight.

Secretly, I like having him home still.

Everything went too fast,

is going to fast. We have speed wobbles.

Topsy turvy are the vibes down here.

I don’t think you’d know how to

navigate this world today.

It’s not like it used to be. We have

boomeranged backwards in the worst ways,

yet cars drive themselves now,

and the internet can be worn in a

pair of glasses. We have accelerated,

and also regressed.

We are pulling ourselves apart.

I remember you still.

Where you were once the moon,

you are now Neptune, further away,

harder to see, dimmer in the sky.

And yet you are out there.

Even if he doesn’t remember you,

even when the shadows grow longer,

I remember that you were once here.

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I don’t do politics.

National politics doesn’t effect me.

Both parties are bad.

Two wings of the same bird.

My vote doesn’t matter anyway.

I don’t have time to follow the news.

All media is bad.

We have all heard someone say something along these lines. And let’s be honest, it’s easy to understand why people feel disinterested or disenfranchised, though these sentiments are not one and the same. The former reflects an inherent privilege, while the latter casts out like a fishing net, entangling various swaths of people who don’t feel heard. Some people can’t be bothered to care, while others have experience that tells them their voices don’t matter. As such, the country plods forward with further polarized views, but also a common reality that a small number of mostly wealthy, white men are reshaping the country in a way that will codify their control for generations to come.

Obviously, White men being in control is not new. This is the factual historical foundation of the US. But in the past 60 years, there was at a minimum, a veneer of caring for the well-being of the nation’s populace by our elected leaders, regardless of the characteristics that make us different from one another. That facade has not just disintegrated; empathy and care for our fellow humans has been rebranded as some sort of existential threat. There is even a new book called “Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind” by Dr. Gad Saad with a cover quote by Elon Musk that says, “Western Civilization is doomed unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognized and actions are taken that are hard but necessary for survival.” Say what?? Sadly, this messaging is very prevalent in the right-wing billionaire orbits of people like Musk, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who collectively donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Republican candidates in 2024.

What is the difference between Disinterested and Disenfranchised voters?

Disinterested folks are protected in some capacity, whether it be by their race, their gender, their wealth, their age or their geographical location, to name a few. For the sake of example, a wealthy man with a comfortable life in Montana may not care if the ACA health insurance subsidies expire for millions of people in California. In fact, he might hope they do. It’s far away, he can’t see the way it benefits people up close. It is an abstract concept that doesn’t impact him in any way other than a few of his tax dollars being thrown into the collective pot for that line item each year. It’s not important to him. When a topic is unimportant to a person, they lose interest. And in that absence of caring, the void is easily plugged up with propagandized excuses disguised as legitimate reasons to explain away inaction. I don’t want people on food stamps buying soda with my tax dollars (why?). Immigrants get everything for free (they don’t). Women are having post-birth abortions (they aren’t). A person who isn’t experiencing poverty, who hasn’t moved to a new country in search of a better life, who hasn’t lost his bodily autonomy, can easily turn a blind eye to the weight of policies that don’t impact him.

People who are disenfranchised spring from a different well. They may be people born into poverty. They may live in communities devoid of services like medical care and access to fresh foods. They may not be well-represented by their congressperson because their city has been sliced up like a pie and smushed into disparate districts with demographics that don’t reflect the place they actually live. Their schools may be crumbling, their bank accounts may be empty. They may not see anyone who looks like them in the ranks of the people who make decisions for this country, their state or community. Or perhaps, they have done everything asked of them, shown up to the voting booth, election after election, only to be disappointed time after time, making the effort to affect change, only to become further marginalized in a country that seems to be increasingly designed to benefit a small percentage of the population. Disenfranchisement is the antithesis of disinterest in that it lacks the privilege to turn influence on or off based on personal impact. Yet both lead to same result: policies being written that don’t benefit the majority the people.

Politics are what build the scaffolding of our democratic society. We choose people to write the laws that shape the world we live in, with hopes that they will protect us, help us prosper, and create a framework that allows everyone to live with dignity. But I would venture to say that the majority of Americans do not currently feel represented by the people who took oaths of office to be our collective voice.

How did we get here?

I live in the beautiful city of Encinitas on the coast of Southern California. I can be in Mexico in a little over a half hour. The land on which I live was Mexico until 1848 when the country agreed to cede its northern territory to the ever-expanding US. Prior to the current day American southwest being Mexico, it was controlled by the kingdom of New Spain, a colonial offshoot of Spanish exploration and exploitation in the “newly discovered” Americas. The 16th century conquests of the Spaniards overpowered the indigenous population of Native Americans who had been living in what is now California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and so on for at least 13,000 years. It also created a caste system that placed proximity to European bloodlines at the top and people with indigenous heritage at the bottom. This created a colorism that took root in many of the new Latin American countries, and sadly still exists, unofficially, today. However, over the past 500 years, Mexico and many other countries in Central and South America became a blend of people with European and Native American ancestry. This is the juncture in which the US and its neighbors to the south diverge. The US never integrated the indigenous population, it isolated it. It never atoned for slavery, it just pretended like it never happened.

This country of ours sleeps under the banners of equality and prosperity, with monikers like “The Melting Pot”, theme songs like “This Land Is Your Land”, and statues imploring immigrants to come pass through our gates. It’s proclaimed that all men are created equal, while allowing said men to own other men. It sang about the amber waves of grain, while pushing the people who had lived here for millennia onto postage stamp chunks of land. For most of its tenure, this country has been a plethora of contradictions.

While we are a nation made up of people from every far corner of the world, the US decided segregation was actually the way to go for the bulk of its history. Some historians attribute this to Anglo Protestant colonialism that favored segregation of different groups, versus the Catholic Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, that bred European, indigenous and enslaved peoples all together.

For Black Americans, they were first othered by slavery, then it was Jim Crowe, followed by Separate But Equal, until its current iteration of integration still largely restrained by infrastructural racism. It arrived as a beautiful young girl being protected by the National Guard on her first day at a historically all-White school. And as a preacher, a Supreme Court justice, a president. It is the labor movement, Title IX, and Affirmative Action. It has also been countered with the full force of conservative ideology in the form of assassinations, elimination of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion initiatives, union busting and voter suppression efforts (look no further than the SAVE Act currently being jammed through congress).

The illusion has been floating like a mirage for decades now, but many White Americans still don’t want integration. They don’t want diversity. They don’t want to welcome the immigrant. They use tokenism and exceptionalism as go-to counterpoints, but in their perfect world, the current Republican Senate, House, President and Supreme Court, would roll the wheel all the way back to the beginning when all men being equal, really meant, all White men. These are the disinterested folks; the system continues to fire on all cylinders for them in the same way their forefathers designed it for themselves 250 years ago, without them having to do much in the way of civic participation. Statistically, they vote for the party that will conserve their interests, no matter how antithetical to freedom the party platform may be.

What happens when national politics becomes local politics?

Politics is inextricably tethered to power. This little beach town in which I was raised has nearly twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans, 45% and 25%, respectively. The remaining 30% file as No Party Preference (total voting percentages are roughly 62% Democrat and 38% Republican). This NPP designation has recently been used as a ruse by conservative local candidates to lure more moderate voters, tricking them into believing they are voting for a unifying council member or mayor, when really some have proven to be a MAGA wolf in centrist clothing. They proclaim they won’t allow national politics to enter the local arena, and then appoint people with verifiable racist, xenophobic, classist and anti-immigrant opinions to city commissions and open council seats.

Of the city council seats and mayorship in my town, four of the five positions are held by right-leaning or conservative men. The lone liberal woman council member is not running for re-election, and the candidate who is endorsed by the remainder of the council and its supporters to replace her is a registered Republican White man. So my liberal town is looking at the potential for an all male, 80% White panel of right-leaning politicians as its representation. This outcome depends on low information voters, and the disinterested.

Like so many other places in the US right now, local politics in my town is colliding with a ruthless national agenda in the shape of masked men pulling people off of their bikes, out of their cars, off of job sites and shipping them to for-profit prison camps run by private companies with exorbitant government contracts where their profit margins hinge on the number of human heads under their roofs. In my area, the people being taken are nearly all people with brown skin, people who are genetically indigenous to the land they are accused of “invading”. I have personally assisted multiple families who are dealing with loved ones who have vanished into this opaque, chaotic immigration system, people here with legal status, active cases, and no criminal history. And herein lies the problem: How can people who support a national effort to deport millions of immigrants, be trusted to protect the immigrants in our local community? I would argue, they cannot.

Encinitas’s current mayor said just last week at a town hall meeting that he is a supporter of Flock surveillance cameras, indicating that the city has a contract with Flock and its data gathering network. He estimated that there may be upwards of 40 cameras positioned around town now, as opposed to the seven that were originally posted when the city signed the contract in 2022. Billionaire tech overlord and Palantir founder, Peter Thiel, invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Flock, as another apparatus of mass surveillance to complement his venture of collating massive amounts of data for use by the federal government, military and large corporations. (Thiel is also Vice President JD Vance’s mentor and invested $15 million in his 2022 Senate campaign, the single largest effort ever invested in a Senatorial race.)

Proponents argue that Flock creates a nationwide tracking system across jurisdictions that helps with crime fighting. But it has already been shown to be doing much more than following an isolated target here and there. It is gathering data, tracking our specific, individual patterns, and has lead to many erroneous, high-risk traffic stops across the country. It has even been used by unscrupulous law enforcement officers to stalk innocent people. Here, we know that several of the cameras are positioned on, or facing, private property where immigrant communities are known to frequent, and where ICE has chased and taken people from in the past year and a half.

There are people on my town’s council and commissions that are climate change deniers and propaganda peddlers accusing immigrants of bringing disease and crime. They throw around terms like “marxists” when talking about Democrats, they urge their “MAGA brethren” to procreate, they turn down millions in a grant to help the homeless, while defunding the overnight safe parking lot for vetted people living in their cars. The mayor even recommended a book to a local church congregation called “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities”. While these perspectives might represent a quarter of Encinitas’s voters, it most certainly does not represent the majority.

So now what?

We forfeited the right to not care about politics a decade ago, whether it is a national or local election, a general or a primary, midterms or presidential. We lost the luxury of not participating every single time. We’ve lost rights, and we are poised to lose more.

In the absence of an informed, engaged electorate, we end up with politicians who don’t reflect our priorities or our collective character. Clearly, this is happening at the federal level, but it may also be happening at the local level in your town the same way it is in Encinitas. Go below the surface, look at candidates’ positions on all levels of policy. Examine who they associate with (this is a BIG factor in Encinitas), who manages their campaigns. If they are incumbents, really dig into who they have appointed to city commissions. Ask questions like, Mayor Ehlers, if you are non-partisan, why are you canvassing for the registered Republican candidate campaigning to fill the District 3 council seat?

Being disinterested in politics does not make a person virtuous, it makes them privileged. And that privilege might be as unintentional as not knowing what you don’t know. But it could also be as serious as not worrying about being disappeared simply because of where you were born or the body you walk around in.

Indifference or uninformed voting can be very dangerous for vulnerable populations in the country. I don’t care what the billionaire tech bros have to say about empathy. I know with every fiber of my being we are here to learn from each other, to care for each other, and to love one another. Our vote is the vehicle, our politicians are the gas, and the policies they put forth are the destination. We have a way to get to where we want to go, but only if we all lock in and vote for a better future for everyone, not just a sliver of the population.

Check your voter registration.

Make a plan to vote.

Really study the candidates.

We’ve got this!

And if you happen to live in Encinitas like me, we have the opportunity to elect the dream team! I encourage you to vote:

Rimga Viskanta for Mayor

Arielle Golden for CC District 3

Brad Lefkowitz for CC District 4

(District 1 and 2 are not up for reelection until 2028)

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I plant flowers in the spring of a new war.

Prune the fronds of the lazy palms that shade

The picnic table in the yard.

Thirty sirens scream on the road below, racing

To the aftermath of another union between

A broken mind and a household armory.

The tomatoes fill in on the trellis, plump and green,

Promising salsa and sauce if given enough

Time to grow.

A little boy talks to a reporter about the bad things

He saw, his sweet voice pushed from his

Cherubic face. He blinks harder than a child should.

The petunias rage in uproarious fuchsia, their thin

Skin fluttering in the breeze. And still they stand in

The unforgiving sun.

Two men lean against their trucks, guns in their

Holsters, cowboy hats on their heads. They are

Not dressed for the beach, nor this town.

I sweep the spiderwebs from the succulents that

Appear to need nothing from me at all. An arachnid

Scurries away to a shady crack.

The light turns green on another housing complex

Where the coyotes used to live, in the canyons that

Held our teenage secrets. Everything old is gone.

Amethyst blossoms shimmy on the fringes of the

Jacaranda. I forget her beauty every autumn until

She returns again, anew.

I learn of cyanide bombs in the mouths of wolves,

And forever chemicals in the blood of humans. It is

Clear that fortune motivates the cruelty, the indifference.

A verdant carpet of grass lays itself tall, bejeweled

With sun-hewed dandelions and wishes to be blown.

Little oaks protect from above.

The names of devilish men stay hidden behind black

Lines while children disappear and women are ignored.

These monsters have existed in every lifetime.

Eucalyptus leaves flutter to the soil, invasive in this

Part of the world, a tree with its soft bark and

delightfully flammable oil.

This baby of a nation, hastily built on the backs of

Stolen people, on the land of the massacred,

Seems on the verge of self-immolation.

The compost heap, a mound of dead old branches

And fresh new clippings, lay on top of each other,

Refusing to merge.

It is hard to imagine that, one day, the layers will cease

To exist, and instead yield something new entirely.

And so the garden continues to bloom.

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His ankles swell, two fleshy sausages bulging above the cinching of his expensive leather shoes. The button on his collar threatens to become a weapon, a bullet of sorts, should the labial folds of his neck flex with too much vibrato. A big mac is served to him on a silver platter, and he licks his stubby fingers as he marvels at the gold appliqué collage that surrounds his office. Bright yellow ore. Muddled orange makeup. All of it is grotesque.

Down the hall a wrecking ball swings like a pendulum on an old grandfather clock. A whole section of the People’s House is gone. A bunker comes to life underground, and a dance floor serves as its roof, where oil men will twirl the plastic women, and technology barons will tickle each other’s necks with whispers about bots and billions. Champagne sloshes. Ketamine courses. The law lives below them all.

Bombs land on drug traffickers, not on small fishing boats. Immigrants eat pets before cashing their welfare checks and going to steal all the jobs. The insurrection was a day of love, and also a production of Antifa and Black Lives Matter and Nancy Pelosi. Venezuela was liberated of its oil. Ukraine doesn’t want peace. Gaza will be a riviera. Greenland belongs to him now. Canada is the newest state. Nobody died except for Cubans. Groceries is a new old word, and not being able to afford them is a hoax. Just like the list of raping goons and pedophilic princes he hides because he is one of them. The rich buy more caviar. The poor skip meals. The lies become more absurd.

His caddy fakes a ball placement on the green. His wife’s smile falls to stone the second he turns away. Slurred words and strange sounds stumble from his pursed mouth, dementia fighting against the cocktail delivered through his plum colored hands. Sleep finds him standing up as easily as it hits him at the cabinet table. But the night does not know his dreams, as his thumbs plunk out hate and policy, and his mind writes new history books based on somewhere other than reality. The bald man runs the show. The short man steals the countries. The drunk man has the guns.

Those of us who see it, this slow terrorism, this fraying final thread, this identity coup, have a syndrome. That is what he says. Shut up and dribble. Shut up and do your job. Shut up and look on the bright side. And all the while he shapes the future, one land grab, one kidnapping, one violation after another. He take down the windmills and turns friends into enemies. He robs us of our unity. He poisons our water. He darkens the days ahead.

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Their ghosts roam these streets

Tire tread marks smudged across

A life we once lived when there

Were fewer people on the sidewalks,

When the road didn’t go through

And the bridge was just two narrow lanes.

The tractors plowed the flower fields

One last time, rainbows gone with the

Wind of a new song, one that hummed

An ominous low note only to be heard

By those who knew the old world,

Those who knew what had been lost.

Their vapor scatters when I reach out,

In memory, my hand plunging through

A fragmented figment, and all I feel is

The cool dampness on my empty palm

And an ache for the way we once lived

Untethered from surveying eyes.

I thought I would always know them,

Our lives winding around each bend,

Arm in arm, tangled like the grays on our

Heads, the creases from smiles

Etched deep in our hollowed cheeks

Now, a thousand miles gape between us.

The canyons are carved up and flattened

Coyotes run down the boulevards, their dens

Buried by the grinding belt of time and

Growth, and still I am here, ever in the

Watchtower as each grain of sand turns

Over once again. My heart longs to leave, too.

The fog rolls in heavy off the ocean, and I

Wonder if they miss it all, the closeness

Of our connections, tied together by old

Wires and answering machines. Our voices

Echo in mist of a time long gone by, waves

Crashing against tin before crumbling away.

I stand guard over the memories of when

They were all here. I wander, green and bitter,

On these streets, the undertaker of capsules

That hold place and time inside of their

Weathered hulls. That I am the last one here,

Stings with the bittersweet current of melancholy.

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They took my father in August. Quietly, they slipped him from our lives. Under the heat of the summer sun, I steeled myself for the first day of school, without mi papá. Maybe they would take me next.

In September, my mother’s eyes began to bulge, the pressure building from a broken heart. My little brother was, is, sick, something about his blood is too thin. I try to get him to eat the food the white ladies bring, but he says no.

October came and the temperature continued to build, on the street and on my family. They stole two of my uncles, ripped them right out of their truck before the sun came up. Why do they hate us so much?

Mi tia asked me to come with her to a job interview so that I could hold the baby in November. I played on my phone while the manager asked if she had her papeles. She carried the baby on her back. I should have been in school.

I had not cried, not even for mi papá. But when they followed mi abuelito to work, and tackled him on the hillside that had turned green from all the rain, I cracked open. My cousins did too. Why would they take an old man before Christmas?

Now, it is only my mother, my aunt and us four kids. We don’t laugh anymore. We all live in a small dark apartment. The window shades are always closed. We don’t even have a lamp. I want things to go back to normal.

I was barely a toddler when they brought me here. I don’t remember Guatemala. I’m American, even if they don’t see me that way. This is my home too. I love to learn, especially history. I want to be a police officer when I grow up.

My mother is not well. She carries the ghosts of our once big family on her shoulders. She speaks so fast, cries, collapses every day. Her skin is purple and broken apart on her face. I tell her to rest, but she won’t.

Mi tia with the baby moved away. I miss the sound of the baby babbling. My other aunt is lost in a fog, trying to find Tio Javier. He has a work permit, but la migra didn’t care about that when they took him. They heard him speak Spanish.

A neighbor reported our family. They said we were bad people. Dangerous, dirty, criminal. We never did anything to them. I don’t know why they would say such things. We do the same as they do: Study, work, eat, sleep.

At school we read about a girl named Anne. There was a big war and her family had to hide for years in an attic. Their neighbors thought she was a bad person like me. They called la migra for her family too. Almost all of them died.

I just want to be a kid. All of this fear makes me sleepy. A grenade landed inside of my family and blew us apart. We don’t know how to put our lives back together. What if I never see my dad again, or mi abuelito?

Am I not a daughter of this land? My skin is made for this arid sun, unlike the neighbors with sickly pale skin and freckles. I crossed some imaginary line in the desert that turned me into a fugitive, a toddler outlaw.

Some days, I feel foreign even to myself. I wonder where I belong. The loneliness of being in hiding. The shame of this poverty. It all keeps me locked inside. Inside this depressing apartment. Inside of my mind.

If they find me, and steal me from my mother, she will not survive. I am the only child in our family not born in this country. The consequence of my existence could be that I vanish from everyone who has ever known me.

Some people think I am strong. Most people don’t know anything about me. I blend in like a deer in the forest. Life is safer if I am stealth, invisible to the eyes that don’t want me here. But one day, some day, in my life

I want to be seen by the light that shines inside of me.

*****

This is written about a real girl, a real family, in my town. Names have been changed to protect their privacy. I have come to know them personally, and will continue to help them as long as I am able, even if it means my name ends up on some list.

This 14 year old girl is brilliant. She is engaging, contemplative and funny. She is a gem that should be celebrated. Instead, she is in hiding. In 2025, in the United State of America, we have children afraid to go to school for fear that they will be disappeared, or that their families will be abducted while they are away.

We’ve arrived at the intersection of humanity and reckoning. All of us are doing something, even the people who are doing nothing, to either feed or diminish this madness. And I can assure you there is an Angelita in your town too. I encourage you to get engaged with the world around you, right now. Terrible things are, in fact, happening outside.

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Hey Dad,

In an hour, you will have been gone for exactly 18 years. I can say now that it seems like a very long time. Kind of like you were never here. I wonder if Mom and D have felt this way longer than I have. You know I kept you close all these years as I did my best to keep the business runnin…

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The bubbles rise from the bottom of the glass,

Each one a celebration of a day well spent.

The dog lazes on the cool floor next to the fan,

As the summer sun finally dips behind the treetops.

The leaves shimmer with the breeze that cools

Just as the hours crawl towards evening.

The propeller of a small plane purrs with a

Passin…

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Why are we always stuck and running from

The bullets, the bullets?

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I will always be on the side of civilians. In war. In terrorism. In protests. Injustice and oppression are bullets used to control the most vulnerable and destitute. Powerful men reward those who are willing to step on t…

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Who are we to trust when they tear down the net that has fluttered beneath us as we swing through the chapters of this life? Do they want to rush the elderly to the exits? Do they want …

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I stand at the end of the road, where the asphalt crumbles into jagged chunks above the sandy soil. Two lizards run towards each other, emerging from underneath opposing shrubs. I watch as they freeze like statues, before doing push-ups at one another. A girl lizard must be watching from a clandestine spot, weighing her options. I lean on the chainlink …

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The man with the voice that sounds like pebbles in a blender, says we will know what has caused this epidemic by the end of summer.

My jaw clenches, and my lungs fill with slow air, pushing my anger back into the cracks and crevices around my heart.

I hate you, I whisper, in the middle of my kitchen. I stare at his weat…

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“The people of the room are unaware of what I’ve done.”

— “Night Sea, 1963” by Victoria Chang

In the middle of the night, she lays on the couch in the living room while her family sleeps.  Deep, deep into the dark hours, her knees bend up like draw bridges and her toes curl into the cushions as she stares at the ceiling vaulted above her.  The moon is still nearly full, slipping across the middle of the sky, inch by unnoticeable inch, until it’s found its way to the window above the stairwell.  She turns her head to the west, catching the glow as it enters the curtainless frame, first as a slice until it hovers as a giant orb, throwing light into the pitch black room.  Shadows form around the outlines of the dining room chairs, and a shard bounces off the kitchen counter in the distance, casting a shape like a sword onto the new refrigerator.   This house was the remnant of her first marriage, the salvaged pieces that splintered but quickly reassembled, glued together by a new love, one that would give her hope and children, sandy toes and big dogs.  A tear drops from her tilted face, and if only someone was there to see it, it glistens in the moonlight as it travels over her cheekbone before hitting the pillow below.

It wasn’t supposed to go this way, she whispers to no one.

Upstairs, her kids slumber, deep in their teenage dreams.  She thinks of them kicking inside of her belly, and smiles before a gasp escapes her throat.  She throws her hands over her mouth, a stern order to stop the sobs that want to escape her.   The kids must not be awakened, they still have growing to do.  Her husband snores in the bedroom down the hall, and she wonders how he can sleep without her by his side.  How he doesn’t notice that she is dying inside.  How her voice makes no sound inside of his ears.

Her phone buzzes next to her.  She already knows who would be sending messages at such an hour.  For a moment, the emptiness is filled.  The dopamine floods her receptors with the soft vibration between the throw pillows as a second message comes through.  Her left hand digs to find the phone and the electronic blue light drowns out the moon, shrinking her pupils to pin heads.

Hey baby.  I missed you all day.  I can’t wait for the day when we can be together.

Her tongue floats to the front of her teeth, and butterflies hatch out of a million cocoons inside of her.  The corners of her mouth curl skyward, and suddenly she is with him in France, standing backstage as he croons to a sea of frothing teenage girls.  She watches him, with pride, and hearts in her eyes, as he turns his head towards her between songs and winks at her, coal black hair flopping perfectly across his forehead.  She is in love with him.  The idea of him.  The dream of this whole thing being real.  Of him being in love with her too.

The light fades on the phone before turning back into a black mirror.  The moon has moved almost completely out of the window frame by now.  The darkness returns, laying black cloth over the stairs, and the tables and the family photos on the wall.  She drops the phone back to the couch and closes her eyes to the obscurity.  The ache returns to her chest.  The ravine between her desires and her reality gapes further apart.

Her dog rolls over on his bed in the corner.  One of the kids lets out a cough from his room above, and she hopes he’s not getting sick.  There are two more hours before the alarm goes off, and the morning hustle of lunches and school drop-offs begin.  She grabs her phone and walks through the black space to her bed, slipping in undetected next to her husband who rolls away towards the closet.  She hugs her phone to her chest, the cold glass screen on her bare skin, and wills her eyes to close before the sun comes up again.

Buy Me a Cup of Coffee ❤️

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When their ship hit the rock, some had already died.

Drenched in saltwater, their dresses hung heavy, pulling

Sand and then mud up under their petticoats as they

Clambered to the new land. Men unloaded wooden

Trunks that held their few belongings from the old country.

They did not yet know that most would die before the w…

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Our hands are still dimpled

our faces still so round

Young feathers sprout from our wings

yet to unfurl, hard staffs waiting to become soft

The demure dip of the eyes

and the curving of our bodies

Contours of fresh budding luscio…

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The world is collapsing, social constructs are crumbling. And we are all walkin…

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The plane is on the tarmac, but no one is in the tower.

The bird never takes to the sky.

The restaurant frying pans are empty, no eggs to scramble.

No one talks about the real reason why.

The bridge on the interstate collapses, a dissection of freedom.

Nobody is left to rebuild in this dark night.

The reservoir …

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(TW: This piece discusses domestic violence; All human names have been changed to protect privacy.)

This past weekend I connected my friend, Melinda, who volunteers at an animal rescue organization, with my dear friend, Nora, who lost her dog, Minnie the one-eyed Saint Bernard, to heart failure last year. Melinda had shared on social media a special res…

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Planes fall from the sky

Thieves raid the treasury, blind

The pillars crumble

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The air on the first day of May is muggy in northern Ohio, nearly 80 degrees and windy. I drive us over one bridge, and then another, watching as Lake Erie laps below us. The water is opaque, sloshing, and the fear of this lake that I remember feeling as a child rushes back to me. It is where I swam with my cousins w…

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