BROWSE Columns
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'Autorretrato', 1936, by Alfonso Ponce de León.
Twentieth Birthday
They stood in a cracked photograph before your tenth
birthday cake like puckered fountain cupids, helping you
to blow out your candles and in your wish. Your wish
then was that they would never grow old, a child’s
wish, born of dependency, your need for them
to flourish for your sake. You looked away, about,
and wondered, if, upon your return to the mainland,
your parents would look the same as always, the same
as in the cracked photograph, or look old, altered.
You glanced up, and saw a long, black, tail-finned
limousine, shining moons of sun, pass out of
sight on the busy street where you entered the bar;
and, startled out of your reverie, you turned about
to find Waikiki Beach behind you, a keepsake
postcard of one of the most important days
of your life, and you wondered at the power
of your first legal drink to so disorient you;
for, when you entered, you were looking out at the sea.
Then you realized that you were on a turntable,
imperceptibly turning counterclockwise, but only,
of course, by the machinations of human will.
E.M. Schorb’s work has appeared in Agenda (UK), The American Scholar, The Carolina Quarterly, The Mississippi Review, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Stand (UK), The Massachusetts Review, Sand Literary Journal (DE), The Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Salzburg Review (AU), The Yale Review, and Oxford Poetry (UK), among others. His collection, Murderer’s Day, was awarded the Verna Emery Poetry Prize and published by Purdue University Press years ago, and a subsequent collection, Time and Fevers, was the recipient of the Writer’s Digest International Self-Published Award for Poetry and also an Eric Hoffer Award. https://www.emschorb.com
