Sarah Carson
MY DAUGHTER’S SCHOOL IS CLOSED AFTER ANOTHER MASS SHOOTING IN AMERICA

So I drive us to the zoo in the closest faraway place, and as she skips down the path to the primate house, the entire savannah is her libretto: hook, line and dirge.

This morning, she asked what could shutter a city so suddenly, and I refused to explain how our species does what others will not do: that a macaque uses a rock to shuck an oyster, but she’ll eat what she finds there. What she doesn’t need will feed the next creature. 

Now in the primate house, we watch a whole chimp colony laze in its make-believe forest. The oldest chimp—Bubbles—makes her way toward the one-way glass on tender hips, sits with her back to us, and I remember a news report from some other Tuesday’s violence, how the gunman approached an office worker from behind—her earbuds blaring—and she fell forward onto her desktop, never hearing her coworkers’ screams. 

That’s how I’d like to go, I thought then. No time for fear. No time for choosing. But that was before I was a mother, halved like an avocado, spread like an epidemic. 

Now, everywhere I go, I see white men with AK-47s.  White men walking in and out of sporting goods stores. 

At my daughter’s preschool field day, a teacher asked me to fill a ten-gallon tub with yellow sugar and water, and I thought of the morning my sister and I sold lemonade to construction workers: White men with hard hats. White men with jackhammers. White men pushing and shoving in my childhood driveway while a police captain who taught us the pledge of allegiance trained his sidearm on our cousins’ uncles, our dads.

Which comes first? The chicken or the person tasked with subduing the chicken? The primate or the prisoner?

Bubbles, a volunteer tells us, is not just a mother but a grandmother, a great-grandmother, and as she scratches her back on a concrete post, a video behind her insists if she was not here, she would have perished at the hands of poachers. 

I think she looks exhausted, but maybe it’s me who’s still learning what it means to be upright, to roll the die of the future. 

That to be tired is a symptom, but not a diagnosis. 

That the cage is the only cure we can conjure–a half-life just big enough to feel both wild and safe.

Sarah Carson is the author of several poetry collections, including How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan (2022), and winner of the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books. She is currently at work on a memoir about single motherhood, work, and the rules that govern the universe. You can read more of her work at stuffsarahwrote.com.

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #47.

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