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ESSAYS - February 2026: Barrie Brewer, Zary Fekete,
Paul Hostovsky, Enzo Silon Surin
"To write is to hope..." ― Enzo Silon Surin
Paul Hostovsky, Enzo Silon Surin
"To write is to hope..." ― Enzo Silon Surin
Barrie Brewer
|
The Choice Between
What if the most authentic version of ourselves lives in the life we never dared to choose? The question rises with the steam from the pasta pot, curling toward the ceiling as if searching for a way out. Tonight, it lingers longer than usual: humid, heavy, and haunting. I’m at the stove, heating water and stirring sauce, while the house hums around me. The dishwasher drones, my kids argue over screen time, the television preaches another round of political noise. A notification buzzes my phone: immediate action required, expired card, auto pay mortgage. I swipe it away, pretending that solves everything. Another deadline. Another reason to stay tethered. “Did you salt the water this time?” My wife slicing tomatoes, turns away with a wry expression. The knife hitting the board louder on the last cut. “Yeah,” I answer, my words here in the present, while my thoughts are thousands of miles away, somewhere deep in the Amazon. It’s been years since our family expedition, but the memory waits for me like an unopened letter. I can still see the river, meandering slow, alive, and crystal clear, with canoes lining the rocky bank. The air thick with something ancient. Time moved differently there—not by deadlines, but from light to dark. And then, there he was: the tribal elder. Painted in ochre and ash, he stood across the water, spear balanced on his shoulders. His gaze was calm, unblinking, unsettling—and familiar. No notifications. No countdown to the next deadline. I did not stay with him. I stepped into the waiting canoe, the one homeward bound. I glanced back only once, my hand tightening around the rough wooden gunwale, as if I could still change my mind. Sometimes, late at night, I wonder if that was the moment I started to drift away from myself. Back at the stove, the pot rattles and starts boiling over. “Dad! It’s overflowing!” my son calls without looking up from his tablet. I turn down the flame. Steam billows and washes over my face. “Got it,” My voice sounds distant. Steam rises from the pasta pot and changes shape—at first a face I half-remember, then the prow of a canoe cutting through rain. Then a reminder I’m still here, still cooking the same meal I’ve made a hundred times. The hiss becomes rain, and I’m back on the riverbank in half-light. I make the other choice. I don’t board the canoe. The current tugs at my legs, firm and cold. In this other version, my wife’s voice rises behind me, “Wait! You can’t be serious!” But the current is stronger than doubt. I wade chest-deep into the river. Her protests fade into the jungle’s embrace. The air tastes of rain and risk. “Dad, are you listening?” my daughter asks. Jerking the spoon against the side of the pot. “Always,” I say, though both of us know it’s a lie. Balancing a stack of plates, she watches me. After a moment, her eyes narrow—not angry, just resigned, like she’s done trying to pull me back. She looks away and sets them down gently, like she’s trying not to disturb something delicate. No more questions. In the life I imagine, the rain never stops. It falls in sheets, relentless, threatening to submerge everything in its path. Our first shelter is a patchwork of palm fronds and failures. My soft hands blister and split on bamboo. The elder watches from a distance, offering no help, only witness. “Pain teaches faster than pride,” I imagine him saying. I learn in silence—striking flint against soaked bark, reading the moods of clouds, waiting for the kindling to believe in fire. “Why does it rain so much?” my son asks one night, teeth chattering under a leaking roof.“Because it can,” I tell him. The answer is satisfactory. Days blur. I stop counting time in weekends. The machete that once blistered my hands now feels like a limb. I start to hear meaning in every sound, the toucan’s warning, the hush before something unseen moves. Even silence speaks. I no longer walk through the jungle. I move with it. My wife transforms too. She learns to pull nourishment from what others call poison, to find rhythm in the moon and patience in the soil. Our children thrive, barefoot, fearless, fluent in instinct. In real life, they stare at tablets, blue light painting their faces. At night, we sit by the fire. Sparks lift like fireflies escaping dusk. I tell stories not from books but from the day’s events: the monkey that mocked me, the vine that bled red sap, the serpent that watched but didn’t strike. The jungle becomes our teacher, our mirror, our measure. A place where who you are isn’t defined by what you produce. And yet, even in that imagined life, it always ends the same way. The river waits. The elder’s eyes find mine. The canoe drifts at the edge of choice. That’s where I wake. “Is dinner ready?” my wife calls from the dining room. The spell breaks. The roar of the fire becomes the low hum of the dishwasher. Steam rises again, curling upward like the question that never leaves. I drain the pasta and watch the water spiral down the sink—a whirlpool of second chances swirling down the drain. “Smells good,” my daughter says, setting out forks. She moves past me and I feel the brush of her shoulder before she steps away. “Yeah,” I say, eyes following the last ghost of steam. For a moment, I see the elder’s gaze—steady, unhurried. My chest tightens, a vice closing around my ribs. I don’t know when longing became a form of betrayal. “Can you pass the sauce?” my wife asks. I hesitate, fumbling with both hands. “Everything okay?” she asks softly. “Just tired,” I say, forcing a smile. She searches my face a few blinks longer than usual. The corner of her mouth twitches, like she wants to ask something like “You haven’t really been with us in weeks.” Instead, she looks down at her plate and the moment passes. Later, when the house falls quiet, I linger at the window. Moonlight splashes silver streaks across the countertops. Outside, wind stirs the trees, and for an instant, our suburban yard dissolves: hedges giving way to vines, lawn and flower beds turning into a rocky riverbank. I close my eyes, and there he is again, the elder, sitting cross-legged on the far shore, spear across his knees. “What are you waiting for?” I whisper. No answer, just the faint rustle of leaves. And then I understand. But understanding doesn’t quiet the longing. It only names it. He isn’t waiting for me. He’s waiting within me. The man I chose not to be did not vanish; he went underground, buried beneath bills, deadlines, and the hum of ordinary life. But he’s still there, breathing, patiently waiting. The refrigerator hums. The clock ticks. In the other room a sleeping child’s half-cry, half-whisper, reminding me that even in sleep, dreams can obsess us. I press my hand against the cold glass of the window. My reflection stares back, older, softer, alive with family, comfort, safety, and love on this side; authenticity, wildness, and solitude on the other. In the hollow beneath my ribs, something stirs, a pulse, a longing, wild and familiar. Maybe the question was never about crossing to the other side. Maybe it was about remembering it was still there. I know I’ll wake tomorrow to the same packed lunches, meetings, and laundry. But somewhere—beneath all that—I’ll still be listening for rain. I smile, the longing inside me softening into a steady breath. Outside, the trees sway, whispering. The jungle’s voice returns, not as a memory, but a reminder of the choice between. Author Note: Barrie Brewer is a storyteller, adventure traveler, and leadership educator whose work explores the paradox between discovery and responsibility. His writing often weaves lyrical realism with lived adventure—from the Amazon Basin to the mountain ranges of North America. This story emerges from his recurring theme: some of the greatest adventures are the ones we never exploit, but never stop imagining. |
A lifelong adventure traveler and keen observer of people, Barrie Brewer brings a global sensibility to his work, shaped by years of working alongside leaders, artists, and change makers. His nonfiction weaves narrative with insight, often delving into the tension between curiosity and caution, purpose and uncertainty.
Zary Fekete
|
The Map of the Class
Our Japanese teacher handed out blank world maps. No names, no capitals…just the thin outlines of continents numbered in neat black ink. We were told to fill them in with country names and capitals written in Katakana. I am in a Japanese language class in Tokyo, where my wife and I recently moved for our missions work. There are six of us, all from elsewhere, all trying to learn how to name the world again. Luka is an engineer from Singapore who now lives in Utah with his wife. They are buying an apartment in Tokyo for when they visit. Alex is Russian; his wife is Ukrainian. They fled to Portugal when the war began, a quiet ceasefire in a personal sense if not a political one. Linda is from the Czech Republic. Her husband works for a Japanese company, and she manages the family’s daily life with their two children as though she were born to navigate foreignness. Song, from South Korea, is also an engineer. His company has given him a leave to study Japanese, and we envy his near-perfect pronunciation. He swears it’s not talent…just the way the languages overlap. And then there’s Paul, from Manila. His wife already lives here and speaks Japanese well. He hopes to join her once he finds a job. When I asked what he does, he told me, almost apologetically, that he’s an auto mechanic. I told him how jealous I was. My father could fix anything…a jack of all trades who kept our family cars running with little more than intuition and a junkyard map in his head. I grew up watching him replace spark plugs and swap transmissions, wondering if I’d ever be that competent. On this morning, our pencils scratched the paper in quiet concentration. Paul sighed often, muttering to himself. When the teacher called on him to identify a country, she pointed to the British Isles. He paused for a long time, then said, “Amerika?” The room went silent. The teacher, gracious and quick, smiled and offered words that softened the moment, but I saw the color rise in Paul’s cheeks. After class we walked down the narrow stairwell together. He laughed about it, but it was a careful laugh, the kind meant to protect a wound. “I’m not good at geography,” he said. “I envy how you know all the countries. My school was very basic.” He said it lightly, but it stayed with me. His knowledge had been built on engines and torque, not atlases. I’d been given maps and books without ever realizing they were gifts. That night, I thought about the invisible balance between us…how what I called “education” was, to him, luxury; and what he called “work” was, to me, mystery. In class the next day, we sat beside each other again. The teacher had us practice new phrases simple sentences: Watashi wa gakusei desu. I am a student. The room filled with repetition, everyone’s accents folding together into something soft and unhurried. Paul’s pronunciation was careful but solid. He whispered the words before saying them aloud, the way a mechanic might test an engine before revving it. When he finally spoke, the sound had a quiet steadiness, as though he were rebuilding something invisible inside himself. During the breaks we didn’t speak much, just small talk about the weather, about the subway system, about the strange difficulty of remembering when to use wa or ga. The conversation was awkward, but kind. At one point, he said, “You know, I was nervous to come here. I thought everyone would be smarter than me.” I told him I had felt the same way. Later, walking home through the clean Tokyo streets, I kept thinking about that. How easily we measure ourselves against one another, how envy crosses borders more fluently than language ever could. I had envied his skill with machines, the way he could turn broken parts into movement. He envied the ease with which I filled in the names of faraway countries. We were, in the end, both just learning…both fumbling through new vocabularies, each of us wanting to belong somewhere, to make something work. Now, each afternoon, I sit next to Paul again. We open our textbooks, bow to the teacher, and repeat the same phrases in careful unison. The sound of our voices is uneven, halting, sometimes wrong. But there is humility in the effort, a shared patience that feels like its own kind of fluency. We keep studying, side by side, neither of us fluent yet…in language, or in life…but both a little less alone. |
Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary and currently lives in Tokyo. He has a debut novella, Words on the Page, out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection, To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction, out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete Bluesky:zaryfekete.bsky.social
Paul Hostovsky
Like Braille
Whenever I come across a poet or writer using braille as a metaphor or simile—this or that is like braille or is like someone reading braille—I bristle a little. I can’t help it. Because I know they don’t know braille. Rarely if ever do I come across a description of what braille itself is like.
Let me tell you what braille is like.
Braille is raised white dots on a white page, like a country of igloos as seen from an airplane on a sunny morning in the Arctic.
Braille is like the goose bumps on the arm of the reader reading an exquisite poem she doesn’t totally get but can’t get enough of.
Braille is six dots in a cell. Two columns of three. Like a narrow three-story building at dusk with two windows on each floor, each window with two possibilities: light on or light off. Dot or no dot. There are sixty-four possible combinations of the six dots. Two to the sixth power. Or two times two times two times two times two times two. The braille reader is a safecracker intuiting the combination by feel, opening the safe and taking the money, the gold, all of it, every time.
Every written language on the planet fits inside the braille cell.
Many words in braille are contracted while others are spelled out. Braille is like the heart, contracting and relaxing.
Some braille contractions can stand alone and also within words, like the of in soft, the for in fork, the the in Theresa, the and in Andy and Sandy.
Some braille contractions are a single letter standing for a whole word--b is but, c is can, d is do, e is every, f is from, etc. It’s the ultimate compression: distilling language down to the first letter of each word in the sentence, like Levin’s secret message to Kitty in Anna Karenina.
A skilled braille reader can read with both hands, left hand beginning each line, handing it off to the right hand halfway across the page, the right hand finishing the line as the left moves down to begin reading the next line. Left hand to right hand to left hand to right hand. Expert, fleet, like a concert pianist, or like relay runners in a race, the handoff accomplished seamlessly over and over, line by line down the page, page by page through the book, book by book through a lifetime of reading.
I like the idea of touching the words. That may be just a romantic notion—I mean, braille readers aren’t necessarily more “in touch” with the words than print readers are—but I like it nonetheless. I learned braille in my early twenties, on a lark. I had a blind roommate. I loved watching him read. I had none of the attendant grief and/or denial that a person who is losing their vision will likely experience when setting out to learn braille. For me, it was just a hobby, something to do, a game, a curriculum of puzzles. More than anything it was fun! It was all about words. And I have always loved words.
I learned it visually first. Then, later, tactilely. Though it took me some time to develop the sensitivity required to read with my fingers, I don’t think braille has made me a more sensitive reader per se. But it has made me a more versatile one: I can read with my eyes closed; I can read with the book closed (my hand tucked inside it, reading); I can read in the dark when my wife wants to go to sleep and has turned off the light; I can read in the dentist’s chair while he’s drilling away; I can read while walking; I can read while driving—left hand on the wheel, right hand on the dots, eyes on the road—eyes on the road!
I used to worry that people who saw me reading braille in public—on the subway, say, or in a Starbucks—would think I was blind or pretending to be blind. A sighted person reading braille, after all, is a rare sight, wouldn’t you say? So, for a long time I was in the closet about my braille reading. I only read at home, or in my car. Or, if I ventured out in public with my braille, I would read it furtively, sort of cloak-and-dagger, braille-in-coat-pocket, keeping it hidden under my jacket or inside my knapsack, fingering the dots clandestinely, feeling somehow vaguely illicit about the whole thing. At the Starbucks, for example, I would build a little fort on the table around my braille magazine—backpack, cup of coffee, folded sweater, water bottle, phone—ramparts surrounding the treasure of the dots, hiding the braille so that no one would see me reading it and mistake me for a blind person, or a blind impostor, or a blind wannabe.
I am not a blind wannabe. But I do love braille. I love the physicality of it. There’s something deeply satisfying about using your sense of touch to access language, knowledge, the world. And I love the irony of choosing it—preferring it—over the digital technology that is everywhere around us shouting its claims of “the world at your fingertips.”
The native fluency of a braille reader who grew up reading braille is something I will never be able to emulate. But still, my speed has noticeably increased over the years. And while I’m proud of that fact, I also want to remember this other, perhaps more important fact: reading braille slows me down—and that’s a good thing. It’s one of the things I love about braille. In a way, wanting to read faster runs counter to that desire for slowing down, for going slow, for being present, for being, literally, more in touch with the world. And the word.
Whenever I come across a poet or writer using braille as a metaphor or simile—this or that is like braille or is like someone reading braille—I bristle a little. I can’t help it. Because I know they don’t know braille. Rarely if ever do I come across a description of what braille itself is like.
Let me tell you what braille is like.
Braille is raised white dots on a white page, like a country of igloos as seen from an airplane on a sunny morning in the Arctic.
Braille is like the goose bumps on the arm of the reader reading an exquisite poem she doesn’t totally get but can’t get enough of.
Braille is six dots in a cell. Two columns of three. Like a narrow three-story building at dusk with two windows on each floor, each window with two possibilities: light on or light off. Dot or no dot. There are sixty-four possible combinations of the six dots. Two to the sixth power. Or two times two times two times two times two times two. The braille reader is a safecracker intuiting the combination by feel, opening the safe and taking the money, the gold, all of it, every time.
Every written language on the planet fits inside the braille cell.
Many words in braille are contracted while others are spelled out. Braille is like the heart, contracting and relaxing.
Some braille contractions can stand alone and also within words, like the of in soft, the for in fork, the the in Theresa, the and in Andy and Sandy.
Some braille contractions are a single letter standing for a whole word--b is but, c is can, d is do, e is every, f is from, etc. It’s the ultimate compression: distilling language down to the first letter of each word in the sentence, like Levin’s secret message to Kitty in Anna Karenina.
A skilled braille reader can read with both hands, left hand beginning each line, handing it off to the right hand halfway across the page, the right hand finishing the line as the left moves down to begin reading the next line. Left hand to right hand to left hand to right hand. Expert, fleet, like a concert pianist, or like relay runners in a race, the handoff accomplished seamlessly over and over, line by line down the page, page by page through the book, book by book through a lifetime of reading.
I like the idea of touching the words. That may be just a romantic notion—I mean, braille readers aren’t necessarily more “in touch” with the words than print readers are—but I like it nonetheless. I learned braille in my early twenties, on a lark. I had a blind roommate. I loved watching him read. I had none of the attendant grief and/or denial that a person who is losing their vision will likely experience when setting out to learn braille. For me, it was just a hobby, something to do, a game, a curriculum of puzzles. More than anything it was fun! It was all about words. And I have always loved words.
I learned it visually first. Then, later, tactilely. Though it took me some time to develop the sensitivity required to read with my fingers, I don’t think braille has made me a more sensitive reader per se. But it has made me a more versatile one: I can read with my eyes closed; I can read with the book closed (my hand tucked inside it, reading); I can read in the dark when my wife wants to go to sleep and has turned off the light; I can read in the dentist’s chair while he’s drilling away; I can read while walking; I can read while driving—left hand on the wheel, right hand on the dots, eyes on the road—eyes on the road!
I used to worry that people who saw me reading braille in public—on the subway, say, or in a Starbucks—would think I was blind or pretending to be blind. A sighted person reading braille, after all, is a rare sight, wouldn’t you say? So, for a long time I was in the closet about my braille reading. I only read at home, or in my car. Or, if I ventured out in public with my braille, I would read it furtively, sort of cloak-and-dagger, braille-in-coat-pocket, keeping it hidden under my jacket or inside my knapsack, fingering the dots clandestinely, feeling somehow vaguely illicit about the whole thing. At the Starbucks, for example, I would build a little fort on the table around my braille magazine—backpack, cup of coffee, folded sweater, water bottle, phone—ramparts surrounding the treasure of the dots, hiding the braille so that no one would see me reading it and mistake me for a blind person, or a blind impostor, or a blind wannabe.
I am not a blind wannabe. But I do love braille. I love the physicality of it. There’s something deeply satisfying about using your sense of touch to access language, knowledge, the world. And I love the irony of choosing it—preferring it—over the digital technology that is everywhere around us shouting its claims of “the world at your fingertips.”
The native fluency of a braille reader who grew up reading braille is something I will never be able to emulate. But still, my speed has noticeably increased over the years. And while I’m proud of that fact, I also want to remember this other, perhaps more important fact: reading braille slows me down—and that’s a good thing. It’s one of the things I love about braille. In a way, wanting to read faster runs counter to that desire for slowing down, for going slow, for being present, for being, literally, more in touch with the world. And the word.
Paul Hostovsky's poems and essays appear widely online and in print. He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Your Daily Poem, Only Poems, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter and braille instructor. Website: paulhostovsky.com
Enzo Silon Surin
|
The Fragile Architecture of Hope: Writing Toward Repair
The week after the November 2024 election, despair was trending. Everywhere I turned—on social media, in passing conversations, even in poetry circles—people were talking about leaving the country, about the end of the world, about democracy as a failed experiment. As someone who grew up in Haiti under a dictatorship and watched the country I loved torn apart by conflict and a coup d’état, I recognized the tremor beneath that talk—the way disbelief can curdle into resignation. It was a strange chorus to live inside: anger pitched against exhaustion, disbelief against silence. I remember clapping my hands one morning and saying, mostly to myself, “Okay. We’ve got serious work to do.” It wasn’t bravado; it was a refusal to surrender to paralysis. That same day, I wrote a short post online that read: If we showed up to the rally together, we shouldn’t be walking home alone in defeat. If we’re going to get through this and rebuild, this is the time to forge connections—not when it’s convenient. And hope is anything but convenient. Despair, I realized, is a luxury not everyone can afford. When I heard people say it was too soon to hope, it felt like a kind of rejection, like being told to carry my grief alone, along with whatever small vision of repair I was still holding. But the page never turns away. To write is to hope, even when the writing begins in cynicism or utter despair. It’s one thing to name the wound; it’s another to build from it. Some of the most necessary writing begins in the dark, when we can’t tell which way is up, until a single line shows a way through. Even if no one seems to be listening, the act of making is its own defiance—its own small architecture of light. That week, I walked into my Social Action Writing workshop—a college course I designed for a time such as this, taught at an art school where words are just one of many materials my students use to make sense of the world—and found a small, steady light waiting for me. We had the rare gift of meeting once before and once after the election—fifteen students who refused to look away. We had been writing poems of witness and provocation, examining how language can both confront and console. But that morning, their presence reminded me of something else: that even when the world feels uninhabitable, there are still builders at work. The room hummed with quiet resolve. Students wrote about loss, justice, and the invisible labor of staying alive in an age of forgetting. They weren’t writing about escape; they were writing toward endurance. In a world shouting about endings, they were sketching beginnings. Without naming it, we were crafting hope. I’ve thought about that day often—how the work of writing became indistinguishable from the work of repair. In a year that kept insisting on its own unraveling, those students built something sturdy out of words. They showed me that hope is not an emotion but a practice, a discipline of attention. It’s what happens when we decide to keep showing up, even when we no longer believe showing up will change anything. In my forthcoming poetry collection, there’s a section titled The Fragile Architecture of Hope. I didn’t know, when I first wrote it, how prophetic that title would feel. Hope really is fragile. It bends under the weight of injustice and fatigue. It requires maintenance, constant repair. But it is also, like any architecture, the result of deliberate design—an act of imagination against gravity. When I write, I think about the materials we build with: silence, syntax, breath. Line breaks that hold the weight of grief. White space that lets the reader rest before returning to what hurts. Repetition as scaffolding, image as beam. The poem, like a structure, must hold what it was never meant to carry, and still let in the light. In teaching, I’ve learned that repair is rarely elegant. It’s more like patchwork: provisional, imperfect, necessary. We piece together something livable from the remains. In that sense, poetry isn’t just an art form; it’s a form of care. It gives us a language sturdy enough to name what’s broken without becoming broken ourselves. But the temptation toward collapse is real. Cynicism is seductive—it lets us feel wise while staying still. It gives us the illusion of control: if we predict the worst, we’ll never be surprised. Yet cynicism builds nothing. It only refines the language of ruin. Hope, on the other hand, asks us to keep believing in the act of making. To write even when the sentence feels impossible. To imagine what might be rebuilt, even as the walls around us tremble. Hope is the poet’s resistance to finality—it insists there is always more to say, more to build, more to hold. The truth is, I don’t think the world can be repaired by poetry alone. But I do believe poetry helps us remember why repair is worth attempting. It gives us a place to practice what the world keeps forgetting: empathy, patience, clarity, courage. It reminds us that language can be both witness and blueprint. Sometimes, when the news cycle spins itself into another storm, I think back to that classroom, to fifteen students and one teacher refusing to give up on the possibility of meaning. I think of how we kept writing, not because we were certain of hope, but because we were practicing its shape. Despair was trending. For some of us, it always is. Hope, I’ve come to believe, is not the denial of despair but its counterweight. It’s the hand that steadies the beam while the structure is still swaying. It’s the sound of fifteen pencils moving across paper, each one testing the strength of what might still hold. And maybe that’s what poetry is: not a shelter from the storm, but a way of standing in it together—hands raw, eyes open, still building. |
Enzo Silon Surin is an award-winning Haitian-born poet, author, educator, and publisher. He is the author of American Scapegoat and When My Body Was a Clinched Fist, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, and the founder of Central Square Press. He hosts the podcast It’s a Poetic Life and lives and teaches in Massachusetts.