"A Birthday Cake"

In honor of National Poetry Month, I am posting work by myself each Friday. This is a piece about fragility and feeling lost in a hostile place, far from comfort, far from safety...

A Birthday Cake

She got out the red Radio Flyer wagon that day,
she put on her shoes, white canvas sneakers with
thin rubber soles, very thin
and she put her child’s shoes on him, white canvas, thin soles,
it was his fourth birthday that day when they
set off, she on foot, he in the wagon, across the molten pavement
in this new place, so different from home, this land
of heat—fury heat, pain heat, so different from home:
the promises, turned out, were lies.
So they set out to the market to get a cake
for his birthday, a small cake, all she could afford, with white frosting
and blue letters, Happy Birthday, they put the cake in the wagon
so he had to walk with his mother under a sun radiating
needles, so different from home, where they wanted to be, but
they returned the same way across the lava ground, so scorching it softened
the soles of their shoes and the cake in the wagon too, roasting the blue letters,
sliding, running, so they didn’t even say Happy Birthday anymore.
Not anymore. So different from home.

©JEF 2025