By: Lisa Suess

A boy eats a pear –
the sweetness of the fruit absorbs
all his thoughts,
he does not think about tomorrow,
he does not think about whether
democracy is over
or his pension plan
or whether pensions will even be a thing
when he is old,
which will be in 2073,
which doesn’t even seem like a year
that could be real.
When I was his age
I owned an atlas for children printed on
dead trees with pictures of
polar bears and no robot had beaten a
human at chess and
a year had four seasons
one of which carried pears.
Golden, heavy fruit
ripe with sunshine.
I used to eat them
absorbed.