Anniversary Celebration: An Attempt in 2021

By Charlotte Pence

It’s too early for the new 
hurricane season, yet warnings
flood my phone. New Orleans’ 
tug boat bellows blocks away. 
Amid the paleness of morning 
mimosas, the bedpost anchors.
Storm alerts confirm:
hurricane is headed our way.
But I’m already cracking
crab legs and contemplating
eleven years of marriage. 
Of what no longer holds 
a charge. A text interrupts:
“Your stepfather’s health is 
deteriorating quickly.”
My stepfather’s neighbor 
“just wants me to know.”
How it always returns to small
cubes of raw fish placed before us,
oil’s admiration for the surface
of things, daughters who slowly
stop kissing goodbye. What is
goodbye when Facebook chooses
memories to return to me?
We push on, down damp 
streets, scent of urine on brick. 
Sax notes rising up like my blister, 
shiny as lighting—
none of which will photo.
At the street corner, an upturned 
bucket sticks out its tongue 
to become a drum, pounding us
to another place: past trips with other 
downpours that laughed, that ducked.
Is this marriage, or is it
raining again? My mother texts
“Don’t worry, relax,” so we pose
a video, scoff at cocktails 
in neon plastic penises, praise
weathered flamingo-pink shutters, 
ignore what shutters do 
when they’re shut, when they’re screwed, 
the storm’s percussive wanting in and in.

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Charlotte Pence’s most recent book of poetry, Code, received the 2020 Book of the Year award from APS. Her first book of poems, Many Small Fires, which received an INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award from Foreword Reviews, explores her father’s chronic homelessness while simultaneously detailing the physiological changes that enabled humans to form cities, communities, and households. A graduate of Emerson College and UT Knoxville, she now directs the Stokes Center for Creative Writing.

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