Sometimes I believed the future lived under the surface of the present, and if I tried, I could unveil it. The way my mother peeled back the artichoke’s scales, paring away a light fuzz to reach the heart. Lately, I’m afraid of the cores I find strewn about the counter. My father’s eating peaches, cherries, plums. So many bananas. He even tries to eat the peels. I remember how he’d prick his finger each day— a globule of blood rising from beneath this moment to its outer tip. He’d stamp his blood onto a strip to learn if he was fine. Now he takes in the sweetness he always feared. As a child I shuddered at that lance, that scarlet sphere. I worry: his worry’s gone. Tira as minhocas da cabeça, my mother says. Pull those worms out of your head. Imagined futures: I need you to stay under the grass, wriggling deep in the earth. Close to its unknown core.
Carolina Hotchandani won the 2023 Perugia Press Prize for her debut poetry collection, The Book Eaters, which will be released in September 2023. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Diode, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and other journals. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska.
10/4 / Meet the Artist with visiting poet-in-residence Raina J. León / The Library at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 6:00 pm EST / Free
10/4 / Poetry Reading with visiting poet-in-residence Raina J. León and local poet Susannah Winters Simpson / The Library at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7:30 pm EST / Free
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