I rifle through the non-festive Target greeting-card aisles
for the perfect kitschy Millennial well-wish. Anything
with a lightsaber or Mario or a laser-tailed pseudo-mouse.
If I could throw a dart at a calendar in order to choose
which holiday my best friend is born on, I’m unsure
whether I’d aim for Valentine’s Day, though admittedly,
it is the perfect occasion for a single girl to engage in some
celebratory deflection. For years, I kept letters, folded
like underwear but more private, baldly desirous & easy
to confess, stacked in a perfumed cigar box under my bed.
Now I make a game of finding new ways to tell my friends
I love them without needing to say it. I bought you a cake
pop, it was pink and had sprinkles. Or play me back in iPhone
chess & I know that you’ll beat me. The song in the car says
I think we’d survive in the wild and I feel the invincibility
of believing we could do something we know we’ll never have to
do. I press the light-up card’s button to listen to its near-comedic
dueling sounds & write you could be a young Han Solo & mean it.
Kelsey Carmody Wort is a researcher living and writing in Chelsea, Manhattan. She has work in Nashville Review, Southeast Review, Smartish Pace, and others. She has an M.F.A. in creative writing from Purdue University. She loves poems.
Image: “Anyone Birthday” by Alex J. Tunney
Pine Hills Review 