Let’s Not Live on Earth. Sarah Blake

ection>

      

      LET’S NOT LIVE ON EARTH

      Sarah Blake

      LET’S NOT LIVE ON EARTH

      Wesleyan University Press Middletown, Connecticut

      Wesleyan Poetry

      Wesleyan University Press

      Middletown CT 06459

       www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

      © 2018 Sarah Blake

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill

      Typeset in Parkinson Electra Pro

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

      Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8195-7766-5

      Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8195-7765-8

      Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8195-7767-2

      5 4 3 2 1

      Cover illustration by Nicky Arscott.

      If you were lost, I would cry, my son says to me.

      If you were lost, I would cry, I say back to him.

      CONTENTS

       Suicide Prevention 1

       Retribution 3

       The E-Ray Is a Gun 4

       One Doctor Leads to the Next 5

       Mothers 7

       I Thought It Was a Good Idea to Walk to CVS with My Son on a Ninety-Degree Day 8

       Everything Small 10

       Two Oaks 13

       Rats 14

       For Max 16

       A Threat 18

       Mouths at the Party 19

       The Safety of Women 20

       You Are Connected to Everything 21

       Monsters 22

       Watching TV, Seeing the Shot Woman 48

       A Poem for My Son 49

       Easier to Write the Poem Where I’m the Queen 51

       In February 2015 53

       My Obsession with Just Is My Obsession with the Temporal 55

       The World 56

       Dear Gun 57

       How We Might Survive 58

       Neutron Star 59

       The Starship 61

       Acknowledgments 115

      LET’S NOT LIVE ON EARTH

      SUICIDE PREVENTION

      New signs at all the local train stations—

      Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

      I’m glad my son can’t read yet.

      Yesterday morning he made up a friend, Lofty,

      who was captured by bad guys.

      My husband asked, Loffy?

      He said, No, with a T.

      If it was a v, it would be Lof-vee.

      He’s starting to get it.

      If it was a circle, it would be Lof-circle.

      He’s almost starting to get it.

      Today he tells me he’s dead. He’s a ghost.

      He misses his ghost family.

      Something’s wrong because they’re inside

      the wall but he can’t get through.

      Then he walks into the wall to show me.

      Then a ghost ladybug shows up who can get

      through the wall, and he saves everyone.

      My son bends down to hug a family

      of very small ghosts.

      I don’t know how to talk to him about death.

      When I told him about his great grandfather,

      who he’s named after, and that conversation

      led right where you think—He’s dead—

      he told me, Only bad guys die, and I

      could only argue that so many times.

      Before I tell my son about suicide, I want to

      tell him about murder, I want to tell him

      about dying of an illness, about dying in sleep.

      It feels awful to hold that plan inside me,

      to know this ranking of death.

      Do I tell him about genocide last? Or

      how you