I smell the air from years ago; summer sweat 
relieved by rolled down windows—the days
from a scrapbook, written and framed in daylight. 
Have you ever pulled into the driveway
of a waiting house? An entire house waiting for you? 
A kitchen with people you know, paper plates & plastics; 
you walk into a hum seated around the breakfast table—
Yes, Uncle Don is doing great; he’s still working at Kroger. 
Didn’t you hear about that neighbor? The one 
who puts the trash out wrong on Tuesdays. 
You see your great aunt who isn’t your real great aunt, 
but you call her that anyway— it makes her happy. 
All your cousins are in another room; rolling eyes 
at the adults. Though now we’re adults, 
they still call us kids. 
If someone told me this isn’t long-lasting, 
I wouldn’t believe them. I wish someone had told me 
it all goes with the dust bunnies. And you’ll ask 
for it all back by blinking through your apartment walls
to an entire house waiting, asking for you to be there.
They were all asking you to be here.

Published January 26, 2025

Maria Santa Poggi is a journalist. Her work appears in Vogue, Teen Vogue, Vogue Business, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Dazed, and Allure amongst other publications. She recently received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and worked closely with her thesis advisor, Marie Howe on her craft.

Genesis Báez is an artist living in Brooklyn, NY. Centering photography, Báez merges fiction, personal narratives, and social histories of modern colonization in a conversation around placemaking. Her works foreground the material qualities of photography, such as relative stasis, edges, and light, and how they come to reveal our permeability: the interconnections that underpin our personal and social lives. Her recent monograph, Blue Sun (Capricious Publishing, 2025), weaves a decade of photographs made in Puerto Rico and its diaspora.

Born in Massachusetts to Puerto Rican migrants, Báez was raised in New England and Puerto Rico. She received her BFA with honors from Massachusetts College of Art & Design, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. She is also an alumni of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She currently teaches photography at Williams College and Sarah Lawrence College.