THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING

Dinnertime

At the table, my baby girl squeezes her fists,
letting the warm potatoes ooze through her small fingers.
Chewing, grinning, she points to the cheese,
she slaps the cabbage,
she squishes the peas until she has written upon her tray,
in her own elegant language,
an exclamation of the pleasures of the body.

The First Day of Spring

The lily in my kitchen
Sags and crowds along the edge
Of the pot, as if burdened

By its caretaker, who reads a magazine
By the window instead of pruning, fertilizing,
Watering, or fretting over the snow currently falling.

Flimsy, brown-tipped leaves
Simply surviving
Until the sun comes again.

A Longing

Sometimes I speak to our mustard
Seedlings on the doorstep as I water them,
Recalling the night
At the ball game when we
Laughed so hard that the sauce
Slipped from your hot dog
And onto my sleeve.

Returning to Vancouver Island

Today, at Willow’s Beach, the breeze combines
The scent of trees with that of ocean tide
As I now search for shells—the purple kind
That look like spoons. My daughters dig beside
The waves with little trucks we’ve borrowed, while
My husband snaps a picture. A woman walks
A dog. A family picnics. Couples smile
And wet their feet. A boy collects some rocks.
But I don’t hear our siblings laugh or chat
Or pray with us like when we all lived here,
And I don’t see my nieces playing that
They’re ponies. Once, we were together here.
I guess when housing jumped and income slacked,
The only question left was when to pack.

Elizabeth Derrick Smith is a freelance editor and writer with a bachelor's degree in English from Brigham Young University. Her work has been published in BYU Studies Quarterly, The Pinnacle, and Pensive Journal. In 2020, she co-founded a free online literary journal, where she promotes works by emerging writers and well as her own: thepensieve.site. She currently lives in Utah with her husband and daughters.