The Gorko Gazette

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thegorkogazette

6.4.2025 6:30 AM

The New Ninety by Carla Sarett

The New Ninety

Angel is sporting a red t-shirt, with glittery pink letters that say, One Hundred is the New Ninety. She asks ‘How does it feel to be a hundred?’ I say, ‘In physics, time is an illusion.’ ‘That is so true,’ Angel says and sips a weird green liquid. ‘Well, we like to say life starts at one hundred.’ She leaves me the t-shirt; red is my worst color in any reality. I hate to break it to the team of One Hundred is the New Ninety, but one hundred feels more or less the same as ninety-nine or seventy-nine, you have to go back quite a few decades to feel different, like when you were a cute baby and all the supermarket mothers waved at you or at your wedding, if you had a lavish destination wedding, which I didn’t, I got married at City Hall and then we ate the usual Peking Duck and flew all over and then we were seventy and in-between, I was forty or fifty and losing sleep about growing old, although people said, you look so young, you’re always smiling, and then I was not smiling, it was like a silent retreat, but I hadn’t paid, so I guess it was not an authentic retreat or anything except life, which Angel thinks is always starting.

about the artist

Carla Sarett’s latest poetry chapbook, Any Excuse for a Party, is out from Bainbridge Island Press. Her poems/essays have been nominated for the Pushcart, Best American Essays, and Best of Net. Carla serves as Contributing Editor for New Verse Review and lives in San Francisco.

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