summer birthday

a table full of color and handmade nourishment,

antiques from a love that created everything as i know it,

flip flops scattered around the back door -

nostalgia for a lived in home, a place of meeting and knowing.

i was blue and flying down the freeway.

loneliness was not lost on me, but suspended,

sinister behind a sheer veil, the slightest breeze lifting it at any moment.

i sobbed when the wrapping paper ripped open

and floated to the floor, crumpled.

childlike surprise and garden parties and another cancerous season:

twenty-six feels like a closing off of myself,

a time to go inward and onward.

laying on the same beach a decade older,

i wish i could remember my first time; when will be the last?

membranous plastic bags weighed down by mexican food,

love from brown hands laid at our tables.

why is summer always sad? not like the heaviness of winter,

a haze of pink strewn skies holding dusk at bay

but pangs of remembering, a yearning for a once had season.