BIRTHDAY
Boca Raton, March 1995 Clasping my hand around my grandfather's, I pulled him from a doze to rehearse; he was my Daddy Warbucks and I was turning seven, obsessed with Annie. When he wanted to know how we should celebrate, I said, a party with my friends. I hear her voice now, my grandmother asking, What friends do you have down here? and my answer: Leah and Harry, Shirley and Jules, Arleen and Harold. So my grandparents' closest friends came to my birthday party, couldn't eat the cake because of their diabetes, cholesterol, blood pressure. In a drawer is a photograph my grandmother took that night: Shirley leaning against the door, the others sitting, watching as my grandfather and I dance and sing to a cassette tape of the cast recording. I am only the floating hem of a navy polka-dotted skirt as if it twirls out of the frame on its own.
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Katharine Johnsen studies and teaches at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she is the recipient of the Bernice Kert Fellowship. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Birmingham Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She was recently awarded a scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and earned her BA from Emory University.