Birthday Lake
[ Candice M. Kelsey ]

My kids were aware this would be the first birthday in decades not spent at the L.A. Zoo’s reptile house. The irony was that in Southeastern Georgia, I was surrounded by water moccasins, canebrakes, and copperheads. I preferred snakes, however, behind glass. 

My oldest offered, ‘Let’s go to Clarks Hill Lake. You’ll have birthday lake instead of cake!”

I was pleased, both by the rhyme and the image of my dog-tired family bobbing in the fresh water like five upright candles ablaze from the sun’s rays. The trek wove us in and out of South Carolina; the reservoir straddled Georgia’s state line. It had two names. Split and polarized like so much of America, my siblings, my desire. 

Local governance couldn’t agree on a name, so while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were busy excavating and damming, Georgia christened it Clarks Hill. South Carolina, in vile ode to a segregationist Dixiecrat senator, went with J. Strom Thurmond Reservoir.  Clarks Hill J. Strom Thurmond birthday lake it was.

 Perforated lines splitting bodies of water like the Savannah River this lake seemed a type of map humor. I imagined cartographers laughing it up, good old boys clinking glasses of sweet apple brandy as they pretended to establish boundaries for water, aware they were engaged in a necessary fiction. 

What but the shore could mark, name, and claim portions of a river? ‘This wave belongs over here, and currents must mind the margin.’ Ludicrous. My own body, my life of late, was a perforation; the past dammed up true emotions while the present required excavation. The dotted line runs down my middle, and the only heavy machinery I can muster is intuition, which I am learning to operate. 

I was looking forward to taking a cool dip in a freshwater lake, no matter its history. 

Two hours in, weather crashed my party, blowing out our five little flames with a jaunty east-north-east surface wind. The thunder forced us to shore; the downpour taught me to adjust my expectations of Georgia. 

I was last to leave the picnic table. The kids motioned for me to get in the car, their voices muffled and movements out of focus like the universe had painted an Americana portrait with sfumato strokes. My chest was tight from grief. Grief for Dockweiler Beach, the Malibu Bluffs, Topanga, the twin red-diamond rattlers at the zoo, and in many ways my brothers. How eventually everything important slithers away.

Streaked with tears, lake water, rain, and the frustrated eyes of my family, I was no Rothko study in watercolor; I was a middle-aged, SoCal woman in soggy Birkenstocks slapping mosquitoes from my ankles while climbing into my family’s exhausted Kia. 

My oldest caught caught my eye in the rearview mirror and smiled. I wasn’t sure if it was pity, an apology, or relief. Perhaps it was love, a birthday offering wrapped in our shared DNA. How strange to see the silhouette of myself in her reflection. 

Candice M. Kelsey (she/her) is a poet and educator living in both L.A. and Georgia. She's developed a taste for life's absurd glow, long skirts, and juicy opera podcasts. She roasts vegetables like it's a sacred ritual and wears mostly black because her late father-in-law said it's not her color. Somehow her work has received Pushcart and Best-of-the-Net nominations, and she woke up one day as the author of 8 books. Please acknowledge her existence @Feed_Me_Poetry or https://www.candicemkelseypoet.com/

cover photo by Sandeep Chukkala