Same Season

Isabella Cruz Pantoja

 

The season of heat, the season of glimmer,

golden bracelets like flashlights on thin

golden wrists, the season of beachfront

penthouses, gym rat bodies, and friends who

don’t live here anymore, they vacation

instead, go suntanning by the pool, say

suntanning, just like that, a single word,

The season of thunderstorms, the season of

blackouts, of landslides, and mudslides, of

too much water and not enough water, I

didn’t know right then but thirty miles away

a car was drifting down a brand new river,

asphalted bottom, a row of houses where a

riverbank should be, teenager on top of it

with his backpack still on his back, I didn’t

know right then, I was buying tomatoes, rare

pirate’s bounty, perfect red-green treasure

hanging off our hands instead of vines,

cashier winking as she handed over the

grocery bag to my mother and said hope

you’ve brought bodyguards and we all

laughed because they really were that

expensive, weren’t they, and we didn’t know

right then, we didn’t get bad news this time,

even though it was the same afternoon, even

though it was the same season

 


Isabella Cruz Pantoja is a previously unpublished Brazilian poet with a background in music. Her previous projects have combined both the literary and audio worlds, like The Cassette Diaries (2021), a fiction podcast. 

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