You Turned Twenty-Five in EuroDisney by Matt Mason

You Turned Twenty-Five in EuroDisney

Matt Mason

Like in a fairy tale, there was a magic gift
(a bank’s random drawing) and there was love,

the memories, though, the details
are as gone now as the dress from a fairy godmother when 11:59 ticks to 12

without clock chimes, just digital silence,
a few thousand midnights
each taking a thread
away.

At most, there’s one glass slipper left
among mice and pumpkins and torn, old things,

you mainly remember her,
a breakfast where Goofy toppled comically,
a cake of indeterminate flavor,
twenty-five candles in it.

What sticks
is how much is missing.
Even this person you loved so much.

When there’s not
enough magic,
you both know, to make what doesn’t fit

fit,
you have to show patience, have to know
you don’t break up in Disneyland
you wait, like a script,

for a dark hotel room out in Paris,
calm conversation,
then a flight alone,
airplane seat tray table

you will watch
like a TV screen gone static which you’re too tired to change for hour after hour

half
your life
ago.


About the Author

Matt Mason runs poetry programming for the State Department, working in Nepal, Romania, Botswana and Belarus. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for his poem “Notes For My Daughter Against Chasing Storms” and his work can be found in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. The author of Things We Don’t Know We Don’t Know (The Backwaters Press, 2006) and The Baby That Ate Cincinnati (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2013), Matt is based out of Omaha with his wife, the poet Sarah McKinstry-Brown, and daughters Sophia and Lucia.