“Season’s Change” (first draft, so don’t bite me) © Jose Vilson 2007

The buds blossom on trees still covered with frost
The calendar tells us to switch modalities
To warm weather and less layers on our person
Yet, she lays there in her puffy coat
In the middle of the world’s great metropolis
With her eyes to the sky
Her fingers on her left hand caressing a little black book
The other hand held tightly onto a plastic, ivory-colored rosary
Her woolen black hair mops up her stress-wrinkled face
She collapses on the grass next to dying leaves
Rolling her eyes back as mental images of her childhood illuminate the screen behind her eyelids
Eating Apple Jacks while her mother fixed her school uniform or
Fernando Villalona playing on those Saturday afternoons with the smell of salchichones and platanos
Her brother running around with his Transformer and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys
Singing the theme songs in tune with how a 5-year old should sound
In a little apartment building on Sherman and Vermilyea
She’s now restless on her patch of grass when reminiscing about her own past
She yearns for the true love she once felt outside of that apartment building with the man
The seed-bearer that would transform her body for 3 months
Her uterus now a uninhabited vessel
She was christened as an adult once she made that decision
Now she beckons her that child back
Not the one she once carried in her womb
But the one she once carried in her heart
In one false act of sincerity, she’s a season removed from a beautiful growth,
and a part of a season ill-conceived …