Birthdays, Alice Shu ’25

Alice Shu ’25

Birthdays

my first birthday a brick blurred apartment captured in a Polaroid that’s still fading angel food cake hovering at the center I don’t remember the inside just my apple cheeks swelling like red party balloons my brother’s big toe sculpted itself into the misty clouds frosted like our birthday cake ceiling

I invite more friends over when I’m eleven guests flit through rooms like hedgehogs nuzzling apart pillows sifting through snacks burrowing under pillow forts

we tidy when they leave it seems they each took an outside brick as a party favor

I turn fourteen in this American Dream but today there is no oil-pool pizza or cookie monster blue cake iced in wispy pink cursive these I leave behind in the supermarket aisle hidden behind blue-box spaghetti

today we slurp knife-cut noodles wide as pennies extensive as a highway pinched to the clouds during a long drive home