Until the demand for unfinished novels
and poems too short can cover rent
I will keep clocking in
for one odd job or some other —

A man I have seen times before
walks past the shop window carrying clear 
plastic bags about to burst with empty 
bottles and recyclables.

I think of my mother as a child
with her sisters, brother, and parents clanging 
across Flushing Fields, her tiny hands
pulling cans and glass

from bins, or grass, or beneath 
the shade of trees
and dropping them into a bag
as big as she.

What did she dream of then?
A son, many sons, which one
would start a business, star in movies,
elicit pride for the family name?

Perhaps I did not show up at all, perhaps
she only wished to rest in the shade 
under a tree, to stare through its branches 
at the clouds, cradling a journal and a pen.

Published January 26, 2025

Lorenzo is a writer and musician living in Brooklyn, NY. Born in Queens, NY and raised in rural/suburban Ohio, Lorenzo graduated from Suffolk University with a BA in English/Creative Writing. He has worked at independent booksellers since 2019 and is currently training for chaplaincy and spiritual care. Any chance he gets, Lorenzo is either reading works of mysticism, scribbling in his journals, or spending time with his cat, Shelley.

Genesis Báez is an artist living in Brooklyn, NY. Centering photography, Báez merges fiction, personal narratives, and social histories of modern colonization in a conversation around placemaking. Her works foreground the material qualities of photography, such as relative stasis, edges, and light, and how they come to reveal our permeability: the interconnections that underpin our personal and social lives. Her recent monograph, Blue Sun (Capricious Publishing, 2025), weaves a decade of photographs made in Puerto Rico and its diaspora.

Born in Massachusetts to Puerto Rican migrants, Báez was raised in New England and Puerto Rico. She received her BFA with honors from Massachusetts College of Art & Design, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. She is also an alumni of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She currently teaches photography at Williams College and Sarah Lawrence College.