2 poems by Sarah Carson

---

To the Woman Dragging Her Son Across Water Street 

Tell me what he’s done, and I’ll believe you.  

Last week my own daughter 

laid down on the floor of a Walgreens, 

tried to dig a hole to China 

with her fingernails against the tile. 

If you go to war, at least, 

you join a brotherhood. 

Even temple guards have their union.  

But a mother is dropped at the front line 

still hemmoraging.  

We figure it out as we fight. 

Childhood is only a short season, 

a friend assured me, 

her children grown, 

scattered like balloon bombs

in a jet stream.

.

She promised she’d wait for me, 

tied her handkerchief to my bayonet. 

Later on the playground, 

when bigger kids stormed the merry-go-round, 

I used the hanky to wipe my daughter’s soft face, 

pushed back her assailants with my long gun. 

In the distance a car fire blazed the air to waves 

like a daydream:

 so bright, so warm & magnetic. 

All that boiling gasoline, 

so much depending on what happens next. 

To All the Other Girls Making Plans for Themselves in the Trailer Park 

Whose mothers also handed them 

the remote control ……………..(or the Blockbuster card)

before they left for their night classes,

whose fathers disappeared themselves 

& came back, 

disappeared themselves………..& came back

& refused to leave:

Listen:……………..Last week

I flew into a despair 

over something some asshole said 

about commodities trading, 

about how futures could be bought & borrowed. 

I drove back to the place

where I once thought 

the whole world had been stripped 

to its cement blocks & threadbare carpet.

Inside the mobile home’s open door

someone else lie…………….. flat-faced on the linoleum.

His pill bottles on the floor said, 

Every story starts somewhere. 

His pocket change on the counter asked:

Why not before the next bus departs Mechanic and Pearl?

---

Sarah Carson is the author of three poetry collections, including How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan, winner of the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Rumpus, The Slowdown, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, and Copper Nickel, among others. She is currently at work on a memoir about motherhood, work, and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. You can read more of her work at stuffsarahwrote.com. 

---

18 March 2024