National Poetry Month: Day Sixteen

Memory from the House on Palm Street

Surely I have written before
of the birthday party/poetry reading
the handsome Italian cook
the feast
the candlelight
and the poems themselves
read with such breathy love
I am surprised we did not float
up to the ceiling or out the windows
and into the night sky.

How after all of it
we washed the mountain of dishes
and lay together
in the cool grass of early summer
holding the next twenty years
in our clasped hands.