Let’s Not Live on Earth. Sarah Blake

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