Sarah Carey | What I Tell My Unborn Children When They Ask Me Where I Come From

Sarah Carey is a graduate of the Florida State University creative writing program. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Superstition Review, Potomac Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Valparaiso Review, SWWIM Every Day, Rise Up Review and elsewhere. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, The Heart Contracts (Finishing Line Press, 2016.) She works in veterinary medical communications at the University of Florida.

Sarah Carey's Website.

Sarah Carey on Twitter

Also by Sarah Carey: The Heart Contracts Royal Palms Defend Their Place In The Condo Universe Before Landfall Paris Voices

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Exploring Roots in the Hair Salon

February 2018

Sarah Carey

What I Tell My Unborn Children When They Ask Me Where I Come From

Wherever I was, I spoke in the wrong tone, wrong tongue, drew the wrong ears to my story, which, retold, would you have you believe my words were mine alone, not strands of DNA that echo distant passages. I’m on my maiden journey, on a train, or I’m the fresh rail hand who fell onto the track, or was crushed while coupling. This is not my language, but I hope you understand. In time, I saw my true conveyance — migrations swept me here from Ireland, England, Germany, onto farms I worked until the Western Carolina soil wore out, then into mines and textile mills, the lumber industry. Hardy stock I got, yet I could never settle, moved from relative to relative to matter in your most nostalgic recollection, or the hint you’ll feel as intuition — mass of muscle memory, fantasy mother. I’d speak of that: the manifested fullness that I felt, not barren but content, when I began to contemplate regret. Some reflect on change of course if they could break the code to build/ rebuild a life. Others say we’re what our genes express. Let me set the record straight. Part of me broke in Roanoke, where great-uncle Marshall fell from a hotel window — suicide, my mother said, but “accident,” the death certificate read — years past fertile fields, I find ancestral lines near salt outcrops, locomotive factories. In my dreams, I shake the hand of the man who married Marshall’s widow, gave her grandson a namesake. This was fate, I tell you. This was tenderness I can’t swear you’ll inherit. Then I’d turn far west to Indiana, where I’d ask my great-grandfather why his first wife left him, if he ever dreamed of getting even, or of me, the one he never knew, unearthing family secrets, articulating a tree. I share this not to take you where you’ve never been, or to make magnificent my own small sacrifices, but to tell you true — I moved too fast to marry.

< Previous (Caroline Chavatel)Next (Lyd Havens) >