Odds are they won’t read this. Everyone won’t read this.
I write a poem about how there is nothing wrong with me. Everyone won’t read that either. I write a poem about how nothing is wrong and about how I have a wife, and our daughter is due in spring. Maybe it will be raining on the day of her arrival. Maybe we will drive home, and we will light a fire in the fireplace.
We leave the United States to get pregnant and imagine leaving for good and never coming back. While we are disappearing, we dream of disappearing with the Europeans on the Catalonian coast and drinking café con leche and eating boquerones. This is the best way to get pregnant. This is the best way to avoid dying.
Quiet capitalism’s death drive and meditate on Eros’ thrum. It is easy enough to do this when you are cycling up on a towel on a hidden beach that all the tourists know about. Watch French teenagers hurl themselves into the sea from the cliffs. What are the chances they will dash themselves against the rocks?
Once I was a boy and that boy’s dad took him swimming in rivers and bought him sunflower seeds in the shell for cracking between his teeth. That boy’s dad is gone now but back then his dad said to him I love you very much and maybe, if you are very lucky, you will have a child one day, too.
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Joel Tomfohr is a writer living in the Bay Area. He is the author of the chapbook, A Blue Hour (Bottlecap Press). His short stories have been featured in Maudlin House, Joyland, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, X-R-A-Y, BULL, Hobart, and others. You can find him online at joeltomfohr.com and on Instagram @infinitebanjodreams.
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image: Aaron Burch
Rejection Letters 