Alumni Magazine

Look at what the class of 2003 is up to now!

I flipped through the quarterly alumni magazine, the one telling us about the movers and shakers, who’s doing what, and how well they’re doing it.

Doctors holding plaques, distinguished men saving lives. Insurance salesmen dressed in suits and ties. Philanthropists with money made quietly, giving it loudly.

Under our graduation year, your name wasn’t listed, so I assume you are doing just fine, working a 9-to-5, picking up kids from daycare. Or you are in a state of grief over weight gain. A messy divorce. Dreams promised, then unfulfilled. These publications don’t detail the dull parts of our lives.

20 years later, they don’t call to write about the sharp moments in life, ones that don’t raise funds. Those parts, the ones only people close to us can see, or maybe a well-perceiving stranger, are the parts that make us human. They are best kept private, or maybe in the back pages of another glossy magazine, one nobody else is ever supposed to read.

Check out my other poems featured in ILLUMINATION: