POETRY -
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Balloon arches announce the news - Weebly.com
It's a Boy
by Angie Minkin
Maybe you’ve lived here too long,
hands cramped, the bronze July light dissolving in fog so damp you want to travel to mercy. But the garden requires your cold hands, overgrown gooseberry silvered with fruit and snails, the $10 strawberry plant purchased on a whim at the farmers market. Those seven ripe berries your summer harvest. You mutter out front, masked, gloved, shivering as you collect trash the wind has angled, retrieve cigarette butts dropped by the next-door neighbors. Still, the aeonium unfurl in garnet rosettes. and the stalks crashed down by a skateboarder are surviving in potting soil. You like your neighbors and your cats love to stalk the fish drying on their clothesline, yet here you are, snarling like the grumpy old lady you never wanted to become. Hip-hop blasts from the pink house across the street as the family wraps their garage like a gift, the door floating with blue and white balloon arches, the security gate puffy with bright blue letters: It’s A Boy! To celebrate, slick-haired young men pilot shiny SUVs around and around the block, horns harmonizing in hoarse melody, young women waving wildly from open moonroofs. This drive-by baby shower stops only to drop off boxes of Huggies, plates of tamales. The aroma so glorious, it knocks you to your knees. Mama and baby nowhere to be seen, the new dad leans against his prized red Camaro. |
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