Wormholes

Sometimes I believed the future lived
under the surface
of the present,

and if I tried, I could
unveil it. The way my mother
peeled back the artichoke’s scales,

paring away a light fuzz
to reach the heart.
Lately, I’m afraid of the cores

I find strewn about the counter.
My father’s eating peaches,
cherries, plums.

So many bananas.
He even tries to eat the peels.
I remember how he’d prick

his finger each day—
a globule of blood rising
from beneath this moment

to its outer tip. He’d stamp
his blood onto a strip to learn
if he was fine.

Now he takes in the sweetness
he always feared.
As a child

I shuddered at that lance,
that scarlet sphere.
I worry: his worry’s gone.

Tira as minhocas da cabeça,
my mother says.
Pull those worms out of your head.

Imagined futures:
I need you to stay under
the grass, wriggling deep in the earth.

Close to its unknown core.

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Carolina Hotchandani won the 2023 Perugia Press Prize for her debut poetry collection, The Book Eaters, which will be released in September 2023. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Diode, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and other journals. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska.