Sarah Carson

It’s 6:30 in the morning & I am parked
headfirst against a construction barrier,

where from beneath the washing machine whir
of descending airplanes, one luxury SUV

after another pulls past the drive-thru window,
piloted by women in expensive sunglasses,

women I must have been dreaming
I thought I might one day be.

Perhaps in another universe
right now I am also sipping a latte

on my way to some important something
& this is not the last morning

I climb the stairs to an office
a previous version of myself

could not have dreamed
she’d need. Plenty of women,

after all, must leave one life
for another. My father’s mother

left her children to save up the fight
to carry them with her.

My own mother left my sister & me
with the TV remote each night

so she could put other women’s children
to bed in the dark of a country

where we think opportunity is something
we run toward rather than something

that runs us down. I was 21 years old
when I boarded an Amtrak train

pointing away from the city
my grandmother never found the edge of.

Now here I am, hundreds of miles away
from that skyline where our fathers

built the drivetrain,
built the onboard diagnostics,

failed to imagine they might one day
also become obsolete.

In eight hours plus a lunch break,
it will all be over. I’ll collect my daughter

from her cinder block nursery,
take her back to the same carpet

where my mother once left me,
so she could go to work

while I grew up so sure
I could be anything.

How does it feel to be back,
my grandmother will ask.

& it doesn’t matter how I answer.
She’ll light another cigarette,

turn the TV back up.

Bio

Sarah Carson is the author of poems, short stories, and essays that have appeared in such places as Brevity, Guernica, The Missouri Review, and Diagram, as well as the full-length poetry collection, How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan (Persea Books). You can read more of her work at stuffsarahwrote.com.