Protector
Steve Castro
I handed her the rope. “That’s an octopus,” she said. “Might as well be ink & paper,” I replied. “Then can you write me a novella?” She suggested. “About what?” I asked. “Why don’t you write a love story between a machete & a cigar,” she said enthusiastically. The rope turned octopus then commented that such a love story had already been written. Ink & paper don’t just write themselves, I thought before a loud splash was heard coming through the open kitchen window. The octopus holding a machete in each tentacle told us to stay put while it disappeared into the black lagoon to investigate.
Steve Castro is a Costa Rican surrealist whose 2019 debut poetry collection, Blue Whale Phenomena, was published by Otis Books (Otis College of Art and Design. Los Angeles, CA). His poetry is forthcoming in Image Journal & Bayou Magazine. It has appeared in Guesthouse; Salamander; PALABRITAS (Harvard College); Water~Stone Review; Strange Horizons; DIAGRAM; Green Mountains Review; Verse Daily; The Florida Review; Forklift, Ohio; etc. He holds two undergraduate degrees (B.S. & B.A.) from Indiana University-Bloomington. He earned his M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from The American University in Washington, D.C.