The Birthday Issue

*The Birthday Issue is sold out!*

It’s January 2025, and this year, CV2 Magazine turns 50 years old. A quick, hopefully accurate calculation (you’ll find a poem in this issue by Joanna Lilley, the title of which, “Not maths people,” sums up the CV2 staff), suggests that in our 50 years we’ve published a slightly mind-boggling 6,000-plus number of works, by several thousand writers. Each one of those works was selected with care, published with enthusiasm, and read by many an appreciative eye. Some of those pieces marked the beginnings of illustrious writing careers; some were the first and only publication by their author. Each one is precious; each one provides an essential stitch in what CV2 has grown to become.

We asked our contributors to this issue to consider the theme of “birthdays” from a broad perspective. Some of the poems you’ll find here, like “Time Travel for a Sexagenarian,” by Kate Marshall Flaherty, or Madeline Barber’s “Self Portrait at 29,” explore specific birthdays and specific ages in their speakers’ lives. Some allow us in to bear witness to the physical experience of giving birth, as in Y.S. Lee’s “A Violence.” While others, like Kristy Snedden’s “Horse Language in Utero,” take us briefly to that time before birth, a time whose unburdened nature is sometimes evoked to bring comfort to the prospect of death. Birth and death, celebration and mourning, wishes and fears—it’s all here.

How does 50 feel for CV2? 50 feels shiny. Symmetrical. Part-way to some indistinct something, but also nowhere near. It also feels like being well loved, because to reach this fine age, as a poetry magazine, means we really must be—and that one’s all thanks to you.

With love and gratitude,

Chelsea Peters, Editor, & all the many who have ever been a part of CV2