Homecoming
I drove to Newark to run some errands. This is the place
we made a home when we left our first home. A quick trip
is not something I have mastered, though
the plan was simple: pick up mail, lunch with a friend,
stop at the bakery and supermarket. Each of these stops
is an old adventure on a new page. I struggle to keep up with all
that is different. A curious kind of change, not like a burning addition
or cold, abrupt erasure. More like a slow,
simmering transformation.
New construction like scaffolded hubris reaching
dozens of stories high. The sun is out and the yellow
light might very well be holding everything in place.
I have been so busy going about my own life,
in a zip code fifty miles west of here, chasing
after my problems—-what terse corruptions
distracted me from this newness emerged?
I see an old building now that
once was new to me. Bright, bold
bricks all those years ago, their vivid
orange, bubbly grooves, and it’s like I’m
all the way back then as I step
out of the car all these years later, double-parked
and unphased, wondering why all the new things
have to hate the old ones so.
I touch those same bricks,
covered in a brown wear that is many
years in the making. If I close my eyes,
in some forgotten corner of my memory,
I see myself as a boy, watching a middle-aged man who,
returning to the home of his youth and finding it
changed, complain about the violence
of all things new.
Work
Work is meaning, and I know this is wrong. Work
is meaning, and I’m compensated for it. Work is
meaning to get to that spreadsheet when I’m back
at my desk on Monday, it’s meaning to finish
an email or IM, it’s meaning to finally get that
project off the ground. It’s the way I think about
what I contribute to the world. It’s the label
that appears next to my name, how I might
be introduced at a party or to (a) new company
or when someone new joins the team
at work. Work is meaning in the face of rising
seas and heat and coups and disappearings.
It’s the new assimilation, reason to forget
my mother(‘s)tongue. It’s the implicit why
for the latest business book I’m reading
or that new podcast on auto-download, it’s
how my children see me contributing to
the world as they learn about its apathy
and unfairness and lack of regard. It’s what
they think about when someone asks them
what they want to be when they grow up.
“Homecoming” and “Work” first appeared in Reduction in Force, winner of the May Sarton NH Poetry Prize.
Hugo dos Santos is the author of Reduction in Force (Bauhan Publishing, 2026), winner of the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, and Then, there (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), a collection of Newark stories. He is the translator of Homecoming (Arquipelago Press, 2024) and A Child in Ruins (Writ Large Press, 2016), a staff pick at the Paris Review Daily. Hugo has received fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, MacDowell, and the Disquiet International Literary Program. Born in Lisboa, Portugal, and raised in Newark, New Jersey, he writes toward questions of diaspora, belonging, and memory.
