Poem About Nothing: for Rachel, again

I don’t want to write a poem about nothing. I’m finding it very hard to write one when my child is in a flannel-sheeted p________ at my back and another child has my right breast arrayed into his mouth and another child has died and stands in the corner of the room in the form of an altar.

It’s difficult to write a poem about nothing when the air could smell like rocket _______ if only I took the time to grow rocket, nother word for arugula. Hard to write about nothing when oil drilling.

Or the Af-Am woman with the white and orange microbraids who on the train last night was cursing out that man about weed while pushing back her toddler into the plastic umbrella stroller, and then when the man left she was kissing and cleaning her daughter’s face with her thumbs. They can’t all fit into a poem about nothing.

Nor can how I wept to see her and the toddler and thought about the One Right Path and was weeping so mightily the white woman next to me asked about me, not the other mom, and I could not see my way to help and that is also why I was crying.

2. Sometimes people enjoy poems about nothing.

I’d like to write enjoyable poems.

I am thinking about writing poems about sex.

But they will probably still not be that enjoyable. They will probably have oil drilling in them.

3. also what if you are trying to respond to the music of joints and thoughts? not a poem about nothing but close. can’t even remember what I meant when I wrote this: drugs? music? community, again?

4. Childless people can be said to have the privilege to choose to write about nothing. There, I said it. I forefronted maternity again, without transcending it. But don’t some childless people write about nothing sometimes? Does it take enormous effort? And all those childless people were children, once: they have mothers. I do not want to read every single person’s poems about their mothers though I don’t not want to read those poems.

This poem was supposed to have three more parts in it: one about war, one about whiteness, and one about money. You can imagine them here: