after Julio Cortazar
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‍Start by waking up at 3 am because you are dreaming of your sister again, who isn’t talking to you again, and make a cup of tea while you stare out the window at the dense black sky with no twinkle stars and your heart slips down like a wet sloppy sponge, sliding along your inner thigh until it hits your heel, so you can kick it and stomp it if you like but she’ll still be mad at you because she hates her life, so you just reach down and grab it and slap it back in place then walk outside into the prickling cold with your slippers on to look at the sky and warm up the engine of your old Toyota (defroster purring like a cat) so you can drive down old country roads to nowhere until you can breathe again – No, wait, that was just the smell of all the frogs dying and the taste of man killing the planet and your tears crystalizing into diamonds as they scatter the mass grave. Don’t worry, the elephants will still follow you home.

A Cabrera's poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in The New Guard, Brain,Child Magazine, Colere, Acentos Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Best Travelers' Tales 2021 Anthology, Mer, Deronda, and other journals. Her short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Award and adapted for stage by the Bay Area Word for Word Theater Company. She writes, teaches, dances and ride bikes in San Francisco, but not always in that order.

Nicole Farmer is a reading tutor living in Asheville, NC. Her poems have been published in The Closed Eye Open, Peregrine, Poetry South, The Amistad, Quillkeepers Press, Haunted Waters Press, Adelaide Magazine, Sheepshead Review, Wild Roof Journal, Bacopa Literary Review, Great Smokies Review, Kakalak Review, 86 Logic, Inlandia Review and others.  Nicole was awarded First Prize in Prose Poetry from the Bacopa Literary Review in 2020. Her chapbook entitled 'Wet Underbelly Wind' was published in 2022. Her book ‘Honest Sonnets: memories from an unorthodox upbringing in verse’ will be published by Kelsay Books in 2023. Way back in 1990 she graduated from The Juilliard School of Drama.

website:NicoleFarmerpoetry.com