At the park a birthday picnic glitters safe as a mirage: soap bubbles float slow past the Speedo-clad neighbor’s languid sprawl beneath tinkling pop acoustic covers, past the silver island of cone-capped guests as rippling streamers breezily announce another year gone, and what can they do but mock the bottle’s label as they toast one last livable, sour-tongued month of heat? From a passing window, the driver sings a PSA: “don’t be no fool baby” as boys spring launch tests off benches, turn sticks to scepters hurled skyward as sister bolts after them, a chain of vectors flashing as a toddler in a flowered smock learns to ride the rafts of her father’s feet raised wave by wave, her open face exposed and sunlit, helped and helpless, arms held up
Alexa Smith is a poet and essayist from Washington D.C. She lives in Philadelphia, where she works for a local textbook publisher, edits Apiary Magazine, and teaches creative writing at Temple University. Her work has appeared online in Entropy, Interim, Memoir Mixtapes, Peach Mag, Dark Wood, and STELLA Radio.
