The Parents

FALL/WINTER 2026

The Parents

and Other Poems

Vanessa Jimenez Gabb

The Parents

The early years are harrowing,

‍I’ve raised enough children,

without ever having had any,

My child! I want my child back!

I knew, I could swear to you,

That I would never have children.

No one needed to tell me not to.

I knew enough to know

I’d be doing so in direct relation, no,

Opposition to, the state in which we live,

Which only encloses us more

Every day. I try not to imagine

The future or the alternate reality,

The past of this.

I try not to think of the feeling,

Of moving without a shadow

If I needed to, when we will need to

Move quickly, one day soon,

Already beyond this place.

Wouldn’t that have been easier.

Without a child.

What could have been

A more romantic life, I like to imagine.

All the parties, the unwaking,

The time for solitude,

For an idea taken to its conclusion.

Tension lives in me

So long as I live in tension.

But that time has passed, hasn’t it?

I don’t know why people have children

Or why I did. I do know.

I couldn’t be bothered to go and change

The course of things.

I have lived most moments this way.

A river flows into another.

I fell in love and more love was made.

Yes, that

was it. I was made to feel

like I could do anything,

that everyone could be done.

The only way to have done it.

Not to have known at all what was truly coming.

That is how we do most things,

And how we will do them.

Am I speaking of misgivings?

Regret? Of joy worth having?

And the children are still

Here in these lines, as much

As they aren’t, calling out from inside

The dark tunnels, Come find us!

We can’t! we call back, hearing

Ourselves. Then,

In a moment!

The Almost There

We go to the end,

where the land touches the water.

History is present, power

in the land along the line,

in the line itself, the signs

and those who own the signs.

Last night, after days of nothing

but work, I whispered into his ear,

we’re almost there.

There, distant from here.

There, indeterminate, confounding

us every time we approach.

A nothing word we keep repeating,

trying to give value, trying to go back.

Years ago, we might have known there.

The market was what it was,

changing the language we used,

obscuring who we really were, in the end.

For a brief time, we didn’t say, should we

go to the water. Do we have enough

to do that. Do we really have

a need to create that specific stillness.

We never learn to live actually

with danger, to live inside an illogical logic.

There, our future selves.

The imagined, the desired.

There. And there

is the distance between our life

and the means of our life.

Look! our daughter says, the beach!

The Class

Hours to kill

so, naturally, a long luxurious lunch

without money,

with martinis and octopus, too.

All the compelling ideas

are, before the teaching,

here in this scene, I could believe.

Once, for years,

I, myself, sat and took

in time and language and tried

to learn expressions of feeling,

preoccupied, so sure

my feelings were none of those feelings,

that, if asked my plans

for the future, I’d say nothing