The birthday balloon leaps among chandeliers
in the vaulted ceiling of the dining room. Buoyant
with our yearly wishes, yearnings. My clawing
children have to take turns pinning it under a pillow
during reading time, or tacking its restless energy
between bunks. At last, however, it falls to me,
whose balloon it ultimately is, because I am turning
35, to stow our upwardly mobile friend in a dark,
unreachable corner of the monster closet so the kids
can relax, and shut the door behind it, still pressing
its happily foiled helium nose to whatever heights
available, and say goodnight, knowing sad fate of all
balloons is either to sink over the course of a few days
or shrink: a red dot disappearing over the tree line.
Cameron Morse is Senior Reviews editor at Harbor Review and the author of eight collections of poetry. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is The Thing Is (Briar Creek Press, 2021). He holds an MFA from the University of Kansas City-Missouri and lives in Independence, Missouri, with his wife Lili and three children. For more information, check out his Facebook page or website.