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 keep hearing for a few minutes
after you die? How 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
