Tag: birthday

Summer, 2004 by Mark Smeltzer

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Summer, 2004

I spent that year obsessing
Over my first birthday
With two digits in it.

I told myself that ten
Is a long time to be alive.
When things get big enough

They earn labels like decades.
I probably have ten more decades, I thought.
Even at the ripe age of a decade,
I was still an optimist.

I sat alone in the gravel, flooding ants
With streams of hot dust from my fist.
Chambers breathed and collapsed in the mounds
As they chewed and excavated themselves.

Bored, I flicked a few maple seeds
Into the heavy air.
A gust roped one and I rode it

As it helicoptered through some power lines.
I saw myself below,
A brief bug pawing around in the soil.

*

Mark Smeltzer is a neurodivergent poet who lives among the mountains of northern Utah with his wife, Chelsea, and their rescue pup, Hashbrown.

Two Poems by Grace Mattern

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This Season

A stone kicks up as I walk, lands as a heart.
I turn on a trail that cuts into woods
looking for quiet, the quiet of wandering
a path packed by deer hooves.
Pushing through brush I find myself
back at the road and recognize
my hope. This is the season bluebirds
flock in the village, chipping at feeders,
twitching in shrubs, flicking over the iron fence
of the cemetery across from the hayfield.
Yesterday eight perched on the edge
of the barn roof gutter, plump
and rust-breasted, backs and wings a sky
any of us would be happy to wear.

*

Birthday

Juvenile hawks scream
overhead, complain at not being fed
now that they’ve fledged.

I don’t want to feed anyone
since my mother gave up.

She stopped eating after her final
birthday when I made her
blueberry pancakes for dinner.

She said it was all she wanted.

I used her mother’s recipe
the pancakes golden domes in the pan
sweet and soft

in my mouth and hers. I knew
she was no longer hungry but was happy
to ask for something I could make.

*

Grace Mattern’s poetry and prose has been published widely, including in The Sun, Calyx, Prairie Schooner, and Poet Lore. She received fellowships from the New Hampshire State Arts Council and Vermont Studio Center. Her book “The Truth About Death” won the NH Readers’ Choice Award for Outstanding Work of Poetry.

On Mom’s 75th Birthday by Brian Dickson

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On Mom’s 75th Birthday

Her ghost didn’t show up
this time like other nights

after her death.
I’m sure we

would’ve played Taboo or
Guesstures, watched

her race
to the bathroom from

hard laughter.
Later, one last story:

when her shed with her kids’
and her childhood caught

fire—papers—wide-lined,
gray, filled with words

we were practicing back
then, the wind lifting

the U’s, S’s, E pluses,
S minuses—nothing

left but my sister’s
bronzed baby shoes

searing our grass, trailing
those burnt letters.

*

When not teaching at the Community College of Denver, Brian Dickson avoids driving as much as possible to connect with the quotidian and sacred around him, hang, and shoot hoops. He is also an associate editor of New Feathers Anthology. Past publications include two chapbooks, In a Heart’s Rut (HighFive press), Maybe This is How Tides Work (Finishing Line Press), one book, All Points Radiant (WordTech, Cherry Grove Editions), and various journals. He has a forthcoming chapbook from Finishing Line Press, A Child’s Sketch of the Afterlife, arriving later in 2025. You can find him on Instragram @brihamwrites.

Three Poems by Diane Martin

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Birthday

Walking the dogs on the trail
after the storm, we pause
for a crew trimming a large oak.
Look out! I don’t want that limb
to get me our friend says—

—unless it’s quick. It’s her 90th
birthday and she’s perfectly
aware of her trajectory. The
crew member signals to us:
It’s safe. For now. So far.

Seated in the booth for the
birthday lunch, we comment she’s
as old as Willie Nelson, ask her
whether she’s gleaned any
wisdom from her harvest of years.

She looks down: If you wait
twenty years for a married man,
you’ll end up with exactly nothing.
We order drinks, a big dessert,
her life spilling out on the table.

*

Epistle after the Fires

I’m o.k. now. / I’m back at the primal source of poems: wind, sea / and rain, the market and the salmon. …
      — Richard Hugo

Hugo’s letter to Kizer apologizes for his behavior.
Maybe my poem can outweigh Netflix, cat antics, politics.

I am slowly working my way through a bag of Snickers
bought for trick-or-treaters. No one really tricks, though

last year a seven-year-old said he couldn’t fuckin’ believe
we ran out. The Day of the Dead party was postponed

for evacuation. Death takes a rain check! Still, I’m pissed at
those who wouldn’t leave. A nasty way to die, I think.

We are looking forward to getting together at Thanksgiving.
But the delicata squash is not some special dish. Its only

claim to fame is surviving the ash. We’ll also bring some wine
and pickled green tomatoes—not to be consumed together.

*

Hurricane Mindy

Breaking News was your old girl’s storm,
a category 4, I think. These kinds of squalls
are never really over

force and velocity, jealousy and envy
—snapshot in my folks’ living room—
I can still see

your arms your striped sweater
her contours, her smile with dimples,
maybe I snapped the picture

*

Poems by Diane Martin have appeared in ONE ART, American Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, diode, Field, Harvard Review, Narrative, Plume, and many other journals. One poem received a Pushcart Special Mention, another won a prize from Smartish Pace, and another took second place in Nimrod’s Neruda prize. Her first collection, Conjugated Visits, a National Poetry Series finalist, was published by Dream Horse Press and her second collection, Hue & Cry, was published by MadHat Press. She lives in western Sonoma County, California.

For My Daughter, on Her First Birthday by Svetlana Litvinchuk

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For My Daughter, on Her First Birthday

When my baby was born she had
an extra short umbilical cord

we were extra connected extra close
the doctor’s only choices were to

either cut it immediately or to place her
back in my belly where she could

drink milk from the starry inside
every day I think about how to do that

how it would have been

we could develop our own language
knock twice for yes and once for no

I would describe everything so she
wouldn’t miss a thing. I wouldn’t tell her

about the warplanes flying overhead or
about the ice caps melting around us

I could digest all the world’s pain
for her and let only the sugar pass

when the time comes for her wedding
I can dance on my husband’s feet

the way only daughters do and when
she knocks twice for “I Do”

I will cry tears of joy, my waters
breaking, causing a great flood

*

Svetlana Litvinchuk is a permaculturist who holds BAs from the University of New Mexico. She is the author of a Season (Bottlecap Features, 2024). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sky Island Journal, Apocalypse Confidential, Littoral Magazine, Black Coffee Review, Eunoia Review, Big Windows Review, and Longhouse Press. Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, she now lives with her husband and daughter on their farm in the Arkansas Ozarks.

My Mother Gets a Can Opener and Roses for Her Birthday by Marjorie Maddox

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My Mother Gets a Can Opener and Roses for Her Birthday

The man she loves surprises her
by not giving what she needs
around her finger. On her birthday, the metal ring
from the green bean can
clangs on the counter. She laughs
nervously, runs her finger
along the long stems of new roses
arranged traditionally in the vase
my dead father gave her,
though she would never take his flowers, expensively bought.
And this love, spontaneous in its practicality,
practical in its spontaneity, she wears proudly
everywhere, polished, shiny
as the kitchen her cans still whir in
while the two cook, hungrily, together.

*

Professor of English at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published 16 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); Begin with a Question (International Book and Illumination Book Award Winners); and the Shanti Arts ekphrastic collaborations Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (with photographer Karen Elias) and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, a collaboration with her artist daughter, Anna Lee Hafer (www.hafer.work) and others. How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled? Spelling Mnemonics and Grammar Tricks (Kelsay) and Seeing Things (Wildhouse) will be available in 2024. In addition, she has published the story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite) and 4 children’s and YA books. With Jerry Wemple, she is co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press) and is assistant editor of Presence. She hosts Poetry Moment at WPSU. See marjoriemaddox.com

On Your Birthday by Abby E. Murray

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On Your Birthday

When it isn’t a milestone
but some odd number
between multiples of ten,
when it falls on a Tuesday
and you celebrate by eating
yogurt alone at the sink
or cooking for those
who ought to feed you,
when it disguises itself
as any cold, damp day
and arrives like junk mail,
unconcerned with
the hundreds of thousands
of hours you’ve survived
on a temperamental planet
with a temperamental species,
when the anniversary of you
looks nothing like a gift
and brings you only
the absence of wonder,
find the nearest bit of light
in the room. Any scrap
will do, that sliver pressed
beneath the bathroom door,
maybe, or the quarter-sized
warmth in the palm of your hand
when you stand just so
at the kitchen window at noon—
it needn’t be bright or even
visible to seem impossible,
waves of energy through
nothingness, since nothingness
itself is a kind of space reserved
for brilliance. All this tiny shine,
the light you can reach
right now, is for you, from me,
because I say so. Take it.
What better way to accept a gift
than with empty hands?
Doesn’t it seem to blush
deeper when you know it is yours?
On your almost forgotten birthday,
I claim all that glows or flares
right here for you. It’s outrageous,
I know, but who’s to stop me?
Let’s get drunk on rights
no one suspected we’d claim.
Who will tell you a streetlamp’s gleam
on the hood of a neighbor’s Honda
can’t be yours? Nobody. So it is.
Enjoy it, secretly if you want,
and notice you’ve been noticed,
know somebody loves you
the way daylight loves
a windowpane, consistently,
the way a yellow lamp loves
an otherwise darkened room.

*

Abby E. Murray is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. She teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington. After serving as poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, she recently (and temporarily) relocated to Washington DC.

Two Poems by Emily Lake Hansen

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Change of Address

It was raining the night I left the base,
my belongings shoved in the back
of a green pick-up, everything wet.
At 16, I hadn’t thought of a tarp.
I put trash bags full of clothes on top
of the mattress, blocked the stereo buttons
with a pillow so they might still work
when I got to my mom’s across town.

When the truck pulled away from the house,
the headlights cutting diamonds onto the road,
I looked back thinking I might see my father,
but that night he never left his room. And after
that night, I never came back. The house

might as well have been empty.

*

The Last Birthday Party

Six days after the towers fell,
fifteen candles on a box strawberry cake

at my boyfriend’s house because no guests —
none at all — were allowed that week on base.

We hadn’t been careful enough
to let the cake cool. At least it wasn’t

her sweet sixteen, my boyfriend’s mother said,
the pink frosting a mess on her plate.

*

Emily Lake Hansen (she/her) is the author of Home and Other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books) and the chapbook The Way the Body Had to Travel (dancing girl press). Her poetry has appeared in 32 Poems, Hobart, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Atticus Review, and the Shore among others. The recipient of the 2022 Longleaf Poetry Fellowship, she lives in Atlanta where she is a PhD student at Georgia State University and an instructor of English at Agnes Scott College.

birthday by Eva Eliav

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birthday

I’ve arrived at an age
when birthdays are
kept hidden

the way a woman I once knew
hid her failed fallen cakes
under the bed

nibbling from them
at night
in shame and silence

I celebrated
just the same

beside a lake
that would vanish
in the summer

drunk by a greedy sun

both the lake and I know
our days are numbered

but today dogs race
through the water
yelping with joy

*

Eva Eliav received an honours BA in English Language and Literature from The University of Toronto. The child of holocaust survivors, she grew up in Canada and now lives in Israel. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in numerous journals, online and in print. She has published two poetry chapbooks: Eve (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2019) and One Summer Day (Kelsay Books, 2021).