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  • “Joy Is Earned”
  • Charlotte Pence (bio)

shira shaiman, 1971–2014

It’s easy to forget birth and death are partners, hovering in a corner at an otherwise pleasant party. Right after the arrival of her second child, the doctor said, “It’s back: the cancer.” My friend writes

the update now, subject heading something with the word joy. The message lists the baby’s weight, his height, his favorite song—facts strung along like blue and white pennants. She tells us, too, that doctors agree:

no more options exist. I read the mass e-mail in my office, desk lumped with half-assed student essays, bowl of Dum Dums, quorum of hand sanitizers. What is it that I had been worrying with? We treat these bodies like rented

ponies. Wash them up for the big events, tie pink ribbons in manes, then load them down again, ignore them until everything slows to a stop in a circle of circles. My friend continues with what she wishes for, [End Page 558]

wishing as if such a thing were possible, as if the cake were being carried from the darkened kitchen, the rest of us searching for the lights, for the right pitch, as she leans in, candles casting a yellow circle onto her face. “It’s peaceful,” she says.

“In my twenties, I worried about what I wanted to be. Now I know. I want to be old.” [End Page 559]

Charlotte Pence

charlotte pence’s first poetry collection is Many Small Fires. A professor of English and creative writing at Eastern Illinois University, she is the author of two award-winning poetry chapbooks and the editor of The Poetics of American Song Lyrics.

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