Caroline Picker (she/her) is a queer parent, poet, community organizer, and fundraiser for movements for collective liberation living in Southern Vermont on Abenaki land. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in West Trade Review, Pensive, Tikkun, Make/shift magazine, and the anthology Queering Sexual Violence.
DANUTA
The skinheads have muscles and numbers
but I have a handbag holding a lunch tin,
coins, a stack of papers
the boss demanded by tomorrow,
trauma, and no more fucks to give.
Here I am, just Danuta,
wearing loafers, pleated skirt,
wool coat with shoulder pads and wide lapels.
Later, a thousand people threw eggs and tomatoes
and chased the Nazis out of town.
Whatever comes next, I give you this:
a swing saying not in my town,
saying never forget,
saying no and no and no and no.
ECLIPSE
—for Gaza
I am not punitive by nature.
But I have seen my own children die,
a thousand exploding stars,
and I cannot watch another.
The buildings split to rubble,
the rubble falls,
the dust rises.
Have you ever heard
the noise a child makes
just after
everyone they know
is lost to ash?
I’m not proud,
but I turned away, blocked my ears,
let millennia of my own cries
shudder the clouded earth.
They could not see
that it was my mouth
from which they rose.
EMERGENCY KIT
We packed what we thought we needed:
lavender essential oil, new pruning shears,
a longing for plants as kin, work as purpose,
friends that catch in your teeth.
On our way back, just before the tire popped
going 80 on an upstate highway,
days after the clouds turned green
and the hail came down,
we had felt like we were almost there.
No one stopped to help,
but we had mixtapes and a spare.
In all my wanderings, I have never found
the right lever to pull or flag to unfurl
that means teacup, and home, and this, and more.
THE FIRST TIME I MADE STRAWBERRY JAM
I lived in a moldy barn / with people I wouldn’t call friends or family / strawberry season comes thick / in the pulsating of June / ripe berry a riot / too red to be bloody / exuberant with the stomp / and glisten of belonging / the jam was thin / tooth-boringly sweet / like pride, like freedom / it is not a thing / that one can make alone
THE WEIGHT OF TEN THOUSAND MOUNTAINS
My grandfather’s last words to my father were:
why didn’t you do more to help your sister?
My father carries this like any chances have passed,
the weight of ten thousand mountains.
I have spent enough time and money on the right kind of therapy
to know that corrosion is a desire welled deep within,
which is really about what is left behind,
that even wanting freedom for our own children is a healing,
that being chosen means you never get to choose.
The driving nail in my jaw is my grandfather’s remnant—
he who saved his girlfriend’s little sister from the camps
and married her instead, because how else to get her on the boat,
how else to get away but to get on the boat.
He chose to translate those last words
through me, for some goddamn reason:
Don’t you understand
it all feels like death
and our people
always
have to do
whatever
we can
to keep
whoever
is closest
alive.
THEOREM
if coming through
if opening
if ice-tipped hemlock boughs
if ganoderma on beeches
if deer scat, if bobcats
if holy
if true
if you if we if could
if laundry, if dishes
if mud and salt—
we are coming we are not ready
nevertheless we arrive