Elya Braden

At My Parents’ 45th Wedding Anniversary Party

We all donned masks: Burlesque elephant, elegiac giraffe,
operatic lemur.
My sister said we were excavating our tomorrows.
Nobody knew they’d separate in a year,
divorce in two.
Or did we? I always thought my sister as intuitive
as a table leg, but maybe
that’s one more thing I was wrong about,
like believing her when she said:
you and I will never cut each other off.
We masticated salads of braised hundred-dollar bills,
chomping Franklin’s pursed lips.
We drank & danced, ignored trapdoors & landmines.
I lost a toe.
My husband luged to the basement.
Our children seesawed up the backstairs, played cat’s
cradle with spiderwebs, built pipe bombs out of matchsticks
from LA’s finest restaurants.
Today we dine, for tomorrow we are POWs
chained to lawn chairs, tiny plastic sabers jabbed
through fingertips, tasty party treats for giants.
People Who Need People blasted on continuous loop.
War just another way of saying: I love you.

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Elya Braden is a writer and mixed-media artist living in Ventura County, CA and is an editor for Gyroscope Review. She is the author of the chapbooks, Open The Fist (2020) and The Sight of Invisible Longing (2023). Her work has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Burningword Literary Journal, Rattle Poets Respond, Sequestrum, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, The Louisville Review and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best New Poets. www.elyabraden.com.