Boombox

Her sour
clouds clog
her nostrils.

Clotting the
very tunnels
that oxygenate

her mind. And
when she settles
in the A-train

she brings back
the 80s. Remembering
something she never had.

Clearly non-existent in
that decade yet longing
for an extinct time.

But that’s something
us millennials, or so
people claim, crave.

A sort of nourishment from the past
that isn’t the same in the digital age,
and she sets her ear on the boombox

with the music on a low
setting. Red corvettes, fingerless
gloves, and pot parties.

Pseudo saccharine sweetening
her intentions for a better future.
Pot making her future actions
rot by the time she’s woke.

Her boombox and her
existential crisis is a millennial
cliché.

A briny fermented aspiration
that overcooks pasts its ripeness.
Tasting like the very result of
failure that never overcomes her.

By Maria Ng

Biography:

Maria Ng is a New Yorker living in New Jersey. She spends her days writing, blogging about books and zines, and going to college. She often writes about mixed identity (Afro-Latina and Chinese), memories of family, living in New York, fearing of what’s going to happen in the future, relearning and forgetting languages, and lonely fictional people that are merely reflections of herself. She has an existential crisis every few months or so and is still unsure of what to do now.

She considers writing a form of healing, protest, and sometimes a violence towards your own self. She writes poetry but wishes to be a novelist. She doesn’t like to remember high school, especially the horrendous fiction and poetry she wrote for her creative writing class.

She has previously been published in Rasasvada, Paper Crown Magazine and some other zines.