Fog held the trees as my father’s hand slipped from mine, a soft rite of passage. Blockbuster glowed like a borrowed cosmos, aisles humming with other lives. At home, the screen loosened the world’s weight for a while. We watched together, knowing wonder, like time, arrives briefly, then asks to be returned.

Marie Anne Arreola is a bilingual poet and editor whose work lives at the intersection of speculative lyric, digital culture, and diaspora memory. She is a 2025 Pushcart Prize Nominee, author of Sparks of the Liberating Spirit Who Trapped Us (Foreshore Publishing, UK), winner of the Plumas en Ciernes Short Story Prize, and founding editor of VOCES, a bilingual platform for global artists and writers. Her work appears in over 40 literary journals across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. She is a two-time finalist for the Francisco Ruiz Udiel Latin American Poetry Prize (V and VI editions) from Valparaíso Ediciones, and a recipient of the 2024 Young Poets Scholarship awarded by the Gutiérrez Lozano Foundation.