Are We Not Safe Here?

DARIO R. BENIQUEZ

May 25, 2020

(Mayan legend of the worry people)

My friends worry obsessively.

They worry about the end of the world,

harmonic convergence, Mayan Cosmology, my retirement.

They persist on building bomb shelters,

steel reinforced concrete bunkers, with a water supply

to last one hundred eighty days, can foods: Goya, De Monte,

frijoles, habichuelas, ten-pound bags of Mahatma rice, a shelf

with a RCA transceiver to pick up strayed communities.

They worry about me. Where’s my bunker? Don’t I care?

We can be attacked any minute. Anthrax, biological weapons

are everywhere; an earthquake can strike anytime, a tsunami

can send us scampering to the hills.

Then I think, I could be squashed by a baby grand piano falling from the sky,

this minute or be infected with a rogue virus, but I don’t.

They worry for me, my friends. I worry for them, the worry people.

I carry them with me all the time, and at night, I place them underneath

my pillow and let them do the worrying for me.

DARIO R. BENIQUEZ was raised in Queens, New York. He is an Army veteran, and lives in San Antonio, Texas. He is the facilitator of the Gemini Ink Literary Arts Center Open Writers’ Workshop, which is free to the San Antonio community. He holds an MFA from Pacific University, Oregon, and an MSIE from New Mexico State University. His latest publications can be found in The Brave: a collection of poetry and prose; Voices de la Luna: a quarterly literature and arts magazine; and elsewhere.