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      February 28, 2018BirthdayDave Margoshes

      I was born on a day in July, my father liked to say,
      when the birds ceased their singing, held their breath,
      gathered in silent flocks on the highest branches
      the better to see, a day when the rickety earth seemed
      to pause on its axis and even the activity of angels
      in heaven came to an abrupt stop, as if to note
      the occurrence of something extraordinary, my father
      said. But no, I protested, I was an ordinary child,
      third and last child to my loving parents, first son
      with two sceptical sisters to reckon with, born on
      an ordinary day in the all-too-ordinary month
      of July, but, agreed, in an extraordinary year, when
      there was war to contend with, war and fear
      and a shifting along fault lines, but still,
      an ordinary child born to an ordinary family,
      the start of an ordinary life, nothing for birds
      to concern themselves with, let alone angels. But
      no, my father insisted, the sky held its breath that day,
      pulling the air out of his own lungs. I was there,
      he said, I saw it.

      from #58 - Winter 2017

      Dave Margoshes

      “I’ve been writing poems since I was 16 and actually thinking of them as poetry since my early twenties. I often mine my own life for poems—usually a bit askew, as in this poem, which I wrote on my birthday a few years ago, though I was thinking more about my father that day than about myself. My philosophy of poetics is pretty much along the line of Emily Dickinson’s famous assertion that real poetry is something that knocks your head off. I won’t claim that this poem reaches that high a bar, but that’s what I always shoot for.”

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