I’d like him to play me
a nice song and repeat that he loves me.
How he better tell me first
if he wants to take his life because
I would understand that.
I’ve understood that for a long time.
RETRIBUTION
What if you owed sadness and so
became it?
Are you not indebted to everyone?
I’m asking
what if the debt were sadness?
What if when we walked,
we didn’t say,
this is Gaia’s breast,
but, this is her sadness,
and the mountains made sense,
all the moving plates,
earthquakes and volcanoes?
She pays it forward
and you’ll pay it back.
You will lose your body to
sadness at a point
like a temperature
and then you will wake and wake
and wake and wake and wake to it.
THE E-RAY IS A GUN
My son is asking where his gun is and talking about needing to build his bomb, but it’s not what you think.
This episode of Batman has a gorilla villain who uses a gun and a bomb to turn humans into super-evolved gorillas like him.
So now my son carries around a plastic Fisher-Price golf bag and calls it his e-ray, for evolution ray, and points it at us, KSHH.
My husband, Batman, gets his hand on the e-ray, changes the setting, and uses it to turn my son into a human. And he cries.
He’s acting, but it’s good, in that it’s sad. So my husband changes him back and my son dances around the kitchen.
Later I’m crying in bed watching Cake Boss because Buddy recreated the top tier of his wedding cake for his wife on their anniversary and handmade all the sugar flowers, and she cared about that.
Not that I’m judging her. I’d like to be a woman delighted by cake. I’d like to be a woman who’s eaten a sugar flower.
Gum paste flower. Modeling chocolate flower. Buttercream flower. My mouth full of them. My husband’s mouth full of them. My son’s mouth full of them.
No—I’m hoping there’s a woman that’s at ease somewhere. So at ease in her life.
ONE DOCTOR LEADS TO THE NEXT
Today a nurse told me
my uterus felt large.
Can you imagine
sticking your fingers
in and determining
of that slickness
anything? It’s so fast
usually—the fingers in,
the pushes on the belly,
uterus, ovary, ovary,
done. Pronounced fine
or great or all good
here, one machine of my
many-machined body.
Sometimes a finger in
my anus too, another
angle, and I don’t know,
I’m a small woman
with a big ass arranged
on a table, so ok, just
ok. Find everything
small and positioned.
Find everything in what
I could not. Fingers up
there plenty and it feels
like when I dissected
a squid in middle school,
only, if it hadn’t been dead,
if it were strong. She
paused today. At the top
of my uterus she pressed
again and again.
Now I have to call for
an ultrasound for fibroids
that may have made
my uterus large. Broken
bell ringing in the body
I could’ve sworn
was made of gears.
MOTHERS
Once I heard a mother on the subway say to her toddler, If you walk away one more time, I’m going to punch you in the leg. The kid kept smiling.
Today my son is sitting on my lap at school in the morning, and a boy gets close to us, points to my son’s belly and names him over and over.
My son slaps him softly across his face.
No hitting! That’s not ok! He was being nice. We don’t hit. Are you ok? The boy looks the same as ever. Dopey, gentle, fine.
I know people are judging me as a mother all the time.
I THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA TO WALK TO CVS WITH MY SON ON A NINETY-DEGREE DAY
First we go to the Rita’s next door. The plastic spoon slices that flesh inside my lips—
because you wouldn’t call that skin, right? The rest of the day I run my tongue over the slices,
which remind me of the shape of the spoon, as if it’s in my mouth again.
We waited so long at CVS, I bought my son a coloring book that was on sale.
You color in a page, then you use an app on your phone to transform it. They call it 4D
as if everyone’s an idiot.
For the walk home, we take nine smaller roads. I catch sight of a ground-down stump
to the right of the sidewalk. Only then do I see branches piled high to the left. Just like that
we’re walking through a body like it’s nothing.
I complain to my husband on the phone about how I can’t get the stroller
over the broken cement of someone’s driveway. Only then do I see someone sitting in the yard
within earshot. I want to apologize. I want to say, It’s like mine.
But it’s too late. I’m a bitch at the end of a three-mile walk after my insurance almost
denied coverage for my anxiety medication.
I think my anxiety isn’t mine at all. I think it’s communal.
I know they’ve found that we inherit trauma, but what about when there’s no time to pass it
between generations. What then?
At home, we drink water. We’re covered in sweat. We color in a dragon.
With the app, he flies above the page, the color my son