birthday wishes
Poem by Alyssa Sandoval
i couldn’t have been
the only six-year-old who scrambled to figure out what they should wish for when the crowd started singing happy birthday: a puppy or a pony? a boyfriend or a Barbie dream house? maybe, just keep it simple—world peace? and, at the end of the song, when the crescendo would rise, the panic would sink in; my mind blank, i would just blow and watch the white smoke swirl above the icing a rare opportunity, wasted. at sixteen, i would gear up in the backseat of my mother’s minivan: sit up straight, hold my breath and close my eyes as we drove through the lit underpass on 696, wishing for all the things i thought would make me happy: straight As, straight hips, a car with AC, a boyfriend, an apology, dad’s return tried to cram them all in before we escaped the darkness; a loophole to my childhood query i am twenty-eight when i catch myself under the same underpass, and—though i feel different, and older, more mature and refined—i find myself caught between indecision and trying-to-cram- it-all-in there are screams for justice parading down my street, buzzing like a hive that was poked one too many times SAYHISNAMESAYHERNAMEICANTBREATHE there are teachers begging for solutions on my front lawn, asking to be anything but the sacrificial lambs to a virus we openly admit knowing little about MASKUP6FTAPART there is personal tragedy swept under my doormat, i watch hope shrivel, shrouded by a doctor’s diagnosis lives altered in a single prognosis, you seem smaller every day and i don’t even know if i should wish for hope or health or healing and when the panic sinks in, i wish for silence. i know it’s not the mature thing to do a rare opportunity, wasted, but, i wish, just for a day, it would all go quiet that we could relax, enjoy each other’s company, —have a barbecue, take a walk-- without the lurking presence of death at our door i wish for six-year-old indecision: a puppy or a pony? a boyfriend or a Barbie dream house? problems that could fit on the head of a needle |
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