Susan Fuchtman

The sunrise is a reward for waking up, the universe saying, “hey good job, you’re here another day” (except those cloudy mornings, when even the universe wants to stay in bed.) Spring flowers are a reward for making it through winter, through the polar vortex, when it was so cold that pipes burst, sending a million gallons of water from my apartment building into the leasing office, which months later is still under construction, but the flower bulbs stayed warm enough under layers of pine boughs, which I thought were only for decoration but no, little narcissistic me, they were there to protect those bulbs. There are blue and white flowers on mountain tops smaller than a fingernail as a reward to hikers who made it to the top, a bonus in addition to the view, like a bouquet handed to beauty contestants, but tiny. And a poem is a reward for thinking there might be more, more than the 24-hour news cycle and churches blowing up in Sri Lanka and this stupid president we’re stuck with for now. If you don’t want to get up early to see the sunrise, or flowers make you sneeze, or you don’t have a mountain handy, read a poem. You can even read it on your phone so the people around you will think you’re getting an interesting text from a friend, which is what a poem is, in a way. Now that’s a reward.