i wasn’t afraid to turn forty, as many

women are.  the birthday

i spent alone in a rental on the jersey shore.

the man canceled hours before;

i’d sobbed to my friends –he’s so cruel!  that’s what i kept

repeating: the crisp c, the way 

the word narrows, a glass tube, soothed

my brain stem, like a baby’s gurgling.

i thought to swallow liquid

bleach: i’ll never find anyone

so gorgeous as him and–it’s all downhill from here.

in one baby picture, apple sauce slicks my ruddy face, little

brown flecks of fiber tweed-texture cheeks.  i was so pretty

and–now i’m sallow & dry.  as if it won’t only get worse.

i washed in the white tile shower, left the door open

to watch the ocean’s reflection roll as hot

water rivuletted down my body. 

what would it take to keep

dissolving shells to sand?  to shed this day –

foam on the wavecrest – and begin again?

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Ivy Raff is the author of What Remains (Editorial DALYA, forthcoming 2025), a bilingual English/Spanish poetry collection that won the Alberola International Poetry Prize, and Rooted and Reduced to Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2024).  Poems and translations appear in Ninth Letter, International Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Electric Literature, and West Trade Review, among numerous others, as well as in the anthologies London Independent Story Prize Anthology (LISP, 2023), and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize Annual (Aesthetica, 2023).   Her Best of the Net-nominated work has garnered support from the Colgate Writers’ Conference, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, the New York Mills Cultural Center, and Under the Volcano.  Ivy serves artist communities as MacDowell’s Senior Systems Project Manager, and, as a Jewish artist and a human, advocates for a free Palestine.