TGIF
I woke up early as usual this morning, but I took today off. I usually take a vacation day on my birthday, but because I had to teach, I had to go into the museum yesterday. With that in mind, I decided to take a vacation day today. I rarely take vacation days, but I’m trying to do better so I don’t have weeks of time near the end of the fiscal year that I have to take or lose. Anyway, I plan to largely relax today, and I’ll likely go back to bed in a bit. I need more sleep, but I got up early to feed Isabella and make my own breakfast since I was also hungry.
Tonight, I have plans to go to dinner at one of my favorite restaurants with a close friend. For my birthday last night I celebrated with a prosciutto pizza from my favorite local pizza place, but my real celebratory birthday dinner will be tonight. I may even splurge and get dessert.
I hope everyone has a great day and a wonderful weekend ahead.
Pic of the Day
I’d like to have him delivered for my birthday! All he needs is to be wrapped in a bow (or not).
46 🎂
On this day forty-six years ago, a scrawny, bald headed, and very pink baby boy was brought screaming into this world. I say screaming because apparently, I began crying shortly after I was born and that continued for the next year or so with little relief for my parents. It’s been suggested that I had migraines even back then, but I’m not going to think about that today. Today is a day of celebration. 🎉
My birthday hasn’t been a big event for me in years for a number of reasons, and these days, I’m just happy to still be alive on this earth. I have to go to work this morning (I usually take my birthday off, as is a tradition with people at my museum), but I have a class to teach this morning, so I’m working until noon and then heading home. I’m also taking tomorrow as a vacation day.
Other than possibly going to dinner with a friend tomorrow night, I probably won’t do anything special. Besides, I doubt anything will ever top my forty-second birthday in 2019. That year, I spent several days in Manhattan visiting my friend Susan. We had Thanksgiving dinner together, and for my birthday, she took me to see Chicago (a personal favorite of mine) on Broadway. It was no doubt the most special birthday I’ve ever had.
That same trip, I got to see and actually go inside the famous/historic Stonewall Inn. 🏳️🌈 This photo is one of my favorites not only because Joe Coffee is on Gay Street, but Gay Street also crosses Christopher Street, where the Stonewall Inn is.
What has been your favorite birthday memory?
Life’s a Beach
Yesterday, I asked my students how their Thanksgivings had been. One student told me she’d gone to Destin, Florida, which is one of my favorite beaches in Florida. Considering the fact that it’s 15 degrees F here in Vermont, and it’s 46 degrees in Destin, I wish I was at the beach today. I always loved the beach in cooler weather. It wasn’t so hot that the sugar white sands would burn your feet, it usually wasn’t crowded, and the waters were still their beautiful emerald green (Destin is part of an area known as Emerald Beach for a reason). Alas, all I get in Vermont is white snow, not white sands. Granted, with the current state of politics in Florida, I wouldn’t go there anyway, but maybe the beautiful beaches of the Mexican Riviera. There, it would even be warm. One can dream.
The Last Orgasm
The Last Orgasm
By Tobias Wray
Stars and people and daffodils won’t last forever.
Hands down, forever will succumb to a single sensation,
one last heaven, one last shudder
lost voice carried over the winds of the body, the canyons
of the hands in a shower, snow or warm? Last ashes
of satisfaction dance above an open mouth, teeth like light
in an emptied room, the wet music of the tongue.
Somebody will find the edge to all of humanity’s joy, a flood,
a punctuation will flood her with its certainty,
or them, or us, all at once, and that lonely breach
will ripple through, on and out, with indefatigable atoms.
Those asking hands never to slow their speeding ship
one last starry daffodil excess will blow its soft dunes,
that lost voice, back, over everything that ever came
before. Until emptied out. And if you slow, if you slowly reach
across your own body until you feel it, too, even now?
You can come to an end, even now. It lasts, wanting to.
About this Poem
“I often wonder about pleasure and how we talk about it, and about what happens in the silences beyond that is more alluring still. Those things are marked by the limits of our imagination, which it is the work of poetry to understand and expand. I wrote ‘The Last Orgasm’ in the spillover energy from a prose project on the sublime. In some ways, this poem serves as a meditation on the sublime edge between what we can witness and what we cannot bear to. It is also simply a love poem.”—Tobias Wray
About the Poet
Tobias Wray is a writer, teacher, and arts organizer.
Poems, reviews, and other writing appear widely in literary journals, including on Verse Daily, Poem-a-Day, Impossible Archetype, The Arkansas International, Hunger Mountain, and The Georgia Review. His work has also been anthologized in Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology (Autumn House Press) and elsewhere.
An assistant professor at the University of Central Oklahoma where he directs UCO’s Creative Writing Programs, his interests range from experimental poetics to queer and speculative literatures to literary translation. He served as director of undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at the University of Idaho until 2021. He was a poetry editor for Cream City Review and, until 2017, helped to coordinate Eat Local :: Read Local, a program that partners restaurants with poets from Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin.
He is a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow.
Authors
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