who can help but hope you’re living large
at this very moment, day drinking with scheherazade
& turandot down by the banks of the rio grande?
i hope you’re glowing violet with hunger, cheeks
wet as bone marrow—maria, o maria, the name
for you i only recently learned. same name
as my grandmother, who once spent an unending
summer polishing the silverware of an old german
countess displaced to costa rica. how the riches
shook & shone in her kid-hands, how she dreamed
of her own coming into multiple sets of clothes & fine
china—now, whatever she has, she treasures. do you long
to treasure your roaming husband in all his hazy havoc, maria?
stop all the screaming & just settle down? my grandmother
once said she never hated anyone until her first divorce
at 28, when he screamed away on a motorcycle, left her &
the baby crying on the front porch. said she hated him more
than death. is this how horror stories, like yours, are made?

Adelina Rose Gowans is a 17-year-old second-generation Costa Rican/Honduran-American writer and artist with a love for floral dresses and big skies. Her work has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Hollins University, University of Virginia, Leyla Beban Young Writers Foundation, and elsewhere. She is previously published or forthcoming in Scholastic’s Best Teen Writing 2020, The Interlochen Review, The Minnesota Review, Storyscape Journal, Atlas + Alice, Barely South Review, and Cargoes, among other places. More of her personal projects can be seen at https://www.adelinarose.me/.