You are eight years old. Old enough to hate your parents for uprooting the family from the coast
to this prairie hellscape of bristling wheat fields and feedlots.
Every night you cry yourself to sleep. Because that’s what you do when you lose everything that
means anything. The blue of the ocean and the brine on the breeze. The yellow house shaded by
horse chestnut trees. Your best friend Erica and her brassy laugh. Your German Shepherd, Tuffy,
who you know in your heart is not living his best life on a farm.
Sometimes you cry so hard you almost puke, especially when you think about going to school.
The concrete walls. The hallways reeking of B.O. Teachers that mistake you for the other Asian
girl in school (even though you are not Vietnamese). Students that holler chink as you walk by,
faces pale and poisonous like the lawn mushrooms you kick the shit out of on the walk home.
Sylvia Santiago lives in western Canada. Her writing has appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. Sylvia is an Assistant Poetry Editor at Parentheses Journal and a Submissions Editor at Uncanny Magazine. Find her on Twitter/X: @sylviasays2