Readers Say
We asked readers for their best creative writing. “Travel in Time” by Tanya Contos is one our top picks.
If you could travel to another time or alternate universe, where would you go?
Last month, we asked Boston.com readers to try their hand at answering this question through creative writing. We received poems, flash fiction, and personal essays from readers exploring their memories and imagined futures.
The prompt was inspired by Boston.com’s Book Club’s January pick, “A Fractured Infinity” by Nathan Tavares, a sci-fi adventure book with a romance at the center of its multiverse story.
Below you’ll find one of our selected pieces, a poem titled “Travel in Time” by Tanya Contos.
“Travel in Time”
The past is a remote but not inaccessible destination
not another country
another continent
reachable not by land
only by air or water
or fire
The trick is
to get your ticket from someone you know
someone who used to live where you live
but now lives there
and can tell you what and what not to pack
what to bring as gifts
how to get there safely
how to speak to inhabitants
who may not want to speak to you
Then
when you find yourself feeling confined
as if the continent were shrinking or melting away
until it’s no more than a tiny island
that can’t support life as you know it
let the someone you know
show you how to get home
Then
leave quickly
without looking back
Tanya Contos is a Boston-based writer whose poetry and nonfiction have appeared in numerous periodicals and in the collection “The Tide Clock and Other Poems” (Somerset Hall Press). She speaks five languages and has written in several of them.
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