Breaking [News] by Noor Hindi
We’ll wake up, Sunday morning, and read the paper. Read each other. Become
consumers
of each other’s stories, a desperate reaching
for another body’s warmth—its words buoying us through a world. We carry
graveyards on our backs and I’m holding a lightning bug
hostage in one hand, its light dimming in the warmth
of my fist, and in the other, a pen, to document its death. Isn’t that terrible?
I’ll ask you, shutting my fist once more.
In interviews, I frame my subject’s stories through a lens to make them digestible
to consumers.
I become a machine. A transfer of information. They become a plea for empathy,
an oversaturation of feelings we’ll fail at transforming into action.
What’s lost is incalculable.
And at the end of summer, the swimming pools will be gutted of water.
And it’ll be impossible to swim.
Reflective writing prompt: Write about something lost