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Isabella Cruz Pantoja is a previously unpublished Brazilian poet with a background in music.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.
