We were the October Babes,
You from 1950,
Me from 1960.
On your fifty-fourth birthday,
You managed coffee ice cream with hot fudge
Despite the metastases in your neck.
On my fifty-fourth birthday,
I raise a solo toast with your favorite Coke-with-a-lemon-wedge
To the October Babes being fifty-four together.
This is a reprint of work originally published in Wilderness House Literary Review.
Joanne Corey lives and writes in Vestal, New York, where she is active with the Binghamton Poetry Project, Sappho’s Circle, and the Bunn Hill Poets. Her poems have appeared recently in Eunoia Review, Silver Birch Press, and Wilderness House Literary Review. She invites you to visit her eclectic blog: https://topofjcsmind.wordpress.com.
Eunoia Review 
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