What:
This neighborhood, our boulevards, neighbor boys’ whose long legs count cement stoops, whose daddies warm motorcycles on the driveway, whose mommas can’t leave their card tables, tell these men to ride along. South of the mailboxes, the box elder tree, the box truck now half empty, there was no justice but one solder burn, one pen knife. Momma held us to her thigh as warning. What is a trailer park anyway if not a tire fire, burning barrel? A mirror where the bed fit. The way a slow song hummed through your ribcage in the dark.
Why:
Because all that came next seemed obvious: They say to name the thing that scares you & it will soften. Now—tucked between my hip bone and my ribcage—I’m growing another body. Unto us, this night, in the city of accidents, women split themselves, open. That is all I want for us: a place to return to if it all goes wrong.
How:
One-by-one, morning by morning, every shadow unmoving. We are all one half-decision away from disaster. We don’t have to replant what’s already been left to seed.
Sarah’s latest book, How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan, traces the lineage of four generations of a Flint, Michigan family–from the trailer park to the factory floor to, perhaps, a future far away. Publisher’s Weekly said of the collection, “Hope and a longing for justice coexist in these pages. The vast compassion on display in this impressive work makes it all the more haunting.”
Bio:
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 The Slowdown, Guernica, Brevity, 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
Links:
stuffsarahwrote.com
Poems in Which You Die , BatCat Press
This is Tiny Tina, Dancing Girl Press and Studios
Buick City, Mayapple Press