By Charles M. Sumid Copyright 2025 Written 1998

Maya, who will renew your license in forty minutes
is dreaming at her kitchen table,
3 AM coffee, notebook open
to a half-finished villanelle
about the silence inside snowflakes.

She writes three lines, crosses out two,
keeps the one about February light.
The refrigerator hums in B flat.

Outside, a snow plow scrapes tomorrow into being.

By 5:30 she’s showered, dressed
in the uniform of the invisible:
cardigan, khakis, sensible shoes.
Folds the villanelle into her purse
between tissues and expired coupons,
where it will wait all day, unfinished.

Before catching the 7:15 bus, she stops at the post office.
Two finished poems today—
one about her mother’s hands,
another dissecting the grammar of departure.
Both typed on the Smith Corona she found at Goodwill,
the ‘e’ key slightly faded.

This morning she submits two poems to Badger Review,
circulation 800, printed on a basement press.
They’ll take one, perhaps both.
The editor knows her as “M. Reyes,”
a postal box in Humboldt Park.

Window 3, the one beneath the water stain
that looks like a moth.
Twenty-three years of “Next, please,”
of checking boxes,
of photos that never capture who anyone is.

The fluorescents flicker at the same frequency
as her left eyelid when she’s tired.

She processes your renewal with the same fingers
that last night wrote:
“grief is a bureaucracy
that stamps every cell, files copies in the bone.”

You complain about the wait.
She says nothing,
hands your license across the counter.

Soon, Badger Review will email acceptance
of both poems.
She’ll read it on her phone during break,
delete it, go back to Window 3.

The woman arguing about her photo
doesn’t know that the clerk listening patiently
spent last night writing:
“even pyramids envy the rain.”

Maya nods, explains the policy again,
retakes the photo.
Both of them just trying to get through the day.