EMILY BLAIR

I Don’t Want Children & Wonder

who will keep my bones.
my mother’s bones will rest on my sister’s mantel. she
the child who stayed
close, & closeness valued as if encrusted; I
the mud-kneed black sheep baby
of the family will ask only
where to place which casserole
on some far-off funeral day.
 
who will decide when to put me in a home where I might
make new friends & enemies,
play pranks on nurses & wet myself;
who in hushed tones my old ears will not pick up
will fight on the phone about turns to sit with me
while I look out the window & say
nothing?
 
childless, planning to remain thus barren, what memorial to my life
more than a funeral half-empty? I am bad
at making friends, my sister
is older, my partners always older
by half a decade or more — I worry
that when I die alone, I will finally wind up
on Unsolved Mysteries, not for being raped & murdered
(like I always suspected) but to ask my silent corpse and America, where
was her family?
I will not like die
surrounded by people
I crafted in my body out of hope and air
but that’s nothing to count on because
                            I didn’t go visit
my dying grandfather even once. not once
did I drive two hours to say goodbye to the man about whom
I am knowledgeless, & that lack of interest
reciprocated, & really what I’m saying is
I wrote no eulogy to some great man, I
cried only because my mother cried,
I went home
to my own burnt down apartment of a life
elsewhere & realized
if a future family were anything like me,
I wouldn’t want one, anyway.

Emily Blair is a queer Appalachian poet currently living in North Carolina. Her first chapbook, WE ARE BIRDS, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2018. Recent publications and more information can be found on her website, emilyblairpoet.com.