Julia Guez
On the Occasion of My Half-Birthday
Thyme out in the window box,
wildness and splay of what has always survived winter here,
fasting only to re-emerge greener in the spring.
All I want is the sun on my face.
At the park where I take our children to play,
I want my whole body to feel
light pouring through the leaves
on massive branches with a force that can, finally, be
honest about its own ambition
to draw the citrus and myrrh
out of this or any other afternoon, knowing weeks of them,
knowing months and years disappear
like so many Simeons—
Julia Guez reads “On the Occasion of My Half-Birthday”
Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in Brooklyn. Her essays, interviews, poems and translations have appeared in Guernica, POETRY, The Guardian, Adroit and BOMB. Four Way Books released her first full-length collection, In an Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also a Frame, in 2019. Her next book, The Certain Body, will appear in 2022.