People walking toward a sunset.

About the Feature

Real as Rain

Photo by Henry Xu on Unsplash

That was the year we discovered the sun was thinking of us
this whole time—our dreams but branches of its own,
our picnics enacted by the very wants it conjured,
even a squid’s soccer ball-sized eye, mere manifestation.
No person explained this to us, we all just understood
with such alarming intuition, there was nothing left to ask.
Things shut down for a while—airports, camps, socials.
Needless to say, we became depressed, weakened in purpose,
which surprised the sun as well as us. Nights passed,
turning us subconscious. Days brought us back into focus.
With nothing to make us more than what we were, we recalled:
a hand is not a metal claw, nor a foot a wheel, nor an eye a mirror.
And eventually we became real again, real as rain.

About the Author

Masin Persina lives in Richmond, California, with his wife and daughter and a senior dog. His poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, The Journal, Seneca Review, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. His chapbook Centonials was released by Bottlecap Press in 2024. He graduated from the UC Davis MFA program and currently teaches high school teachers how to teach the humanities in the East Bay.