19.

I know a woman whose back no longer supports her front. She leans her raw elbows on a table. There’s 

also a child, but I can’t show her to you, for she’s gone under

the shadows of the trees.

Into her ocean-

blue elbows the woman pours

the weight of her

having-once-lived.

20.

And yet, we (it was she and I, it was you and I) pried and pulled the carrots from the ground. Brushed off the soil and held them up to a mother with her daughter in a stroller. Later, we put the plums and the peaches in a bag held open. Brought food to the house where the people were grieving. But how large was this garden we were growing? Would it ever be large enough to protect us from the announcements? No. I had put the announcements in the trash, I had even lit them on fire. Had watched the fire burn itself out. But then there was only more of what they were. We held open the soil. Pulled and pried. We to the house, with the proteins, the sugars. We under the threat, in the clamor of the announcements, their endless arrival, their banging, we returned to the garden, and we 

bent

over.

21.

as the back is turned to indicate refusal

as the dark into dark before dawn

as the flaming sword, every which way

as the body by the nurses, as the earth by the farmer,

as the dancers in the pit, in the rave.

24.

Then, because it was finally November, we turned from the garden and its last roots, dropped our instruments, washed our hands, let the earth cover the earth, and turned instead toward each other. There was, in this, always further to go. Likewise, the tongue. Likewise, the fingers. The body had cavities to be filled. Likewise, the mouth. Likewise, the vagina, to be filled (they could not be). In November, as we turned from the earth, we turned to the fact of the wanting-to-be-filled. A friend had posted a picture of a child holding a stone. The child’s arm hung by his side. I shifted my position on the bed so that my arm could rest as I held the picture steadily before me. The longer I lay there, the longer the roads between us grew (between me and my friend, me and the child), like tongues extending out of mouths, horrifically. When night fell, the boy (or was he a man now?) lay down to sleep. He placed the stone on one side of his head, as if for later use, or maybe to induce the dream of the ladder that extends both upward and downward infinitely. What was the stone when he woke up? Was it a weapon or a grave marker? It was neither, it was the cornerstone of a city. Of a city like our city, in which you and I, earlier that day, had been walking.

With your accelerating words, you’d been telling me that you were worried. About the divisions, the strange new affinities, the way we were all forgetting our mothers. A wind tunnel, you said, as we passed narrow alleys between buildings, a wind tunnel was rushing through our minds, erasing all memory. But, I countered, we can never fully erase these memories, these mothers. Like teenagers trying on clothes in a department store, we are only pretending to forget who we are. At that moment, I wanted to grab your wrist, to stop you from walking on. I wanted you to see that the city was made not of blowing wind, but of stones, and that stones are a residence for what we, in our longing-to-be-filled, our ignorance, call god. But your worry, which was also grief, was enveloping you and until you’d finished describing it, it would not disperse. The light was fading, turning the city red. My legs carried my cavernous body beside you. Soon it would be dark, the hours and the roads, longer and longer, now like snakes who extend as they slither away.

25.

As the electricity runs to the socket

to spark the small fire in the bulb

as the people in their gathered chairs

run their eyes all at once toward the speaker

the speaker who is speaking while pacing

before them on a makeshift stage

as the memory from its own mind will

take flight like a grackle from a branch

leaving the mind bobbing empty

having so recently held a bird

as the electorate will suddenly abandon

the candidate, all candidates, all promise

of anything other than turning

away from all that’s been offered

as an anorexic child at the table

the disgust in her body is her body

like the river that is only the river

when running away from itself

the people in the square stand in unison

in unison they turn to the sun

that just then has broken the cloudbank

parting so pinkly the cloudbank

like a mouth parts when receiving or letting

out what keeps it alive.

Julie Carr is the author of 14 books of poetry and prose, including Climate, co-written with Lisa Olstein (Essay Press 2022), Real Life: An Installation (Omindawn 2018), Objects from a Borrowed Confession (Ahsahta 2017), and Someone Shot my Book (University of Michigan Press 2018). Earlier books include 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta 2010), RAG (Omnidawn, 2014), and Think Tank (Solid Objects 2015). With Jeffrey Robinson she is the co-editor of Active Romanticism (University of Alabama Press 2015). Her co-translation of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess-The Factory and The Book of Skies, were published by Commune Editions (2018) and Pamenar Press, respectively (2024). Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2023. Underscore, a book of poems, is just out from Omnidawn (2024). Overflow, a trilogy, will be published sequentially over subsequent years.