Poem with No Children In It

Instead, the poem is full of competent trees,

sturdy and slow-growing. The trees live on a wide

clean lawn full of adults. All night, the adults grow

older without somersaulting or spinning. They grow

old while thinking about themselves. They sleep well

and stay out late, their nerves coiled neatly inside

their grown bodies. They don’t think about children

because children were never there to begin with.

The children were not killed or stolen. This is absence,

not loss. There is a world of difference: the distance

between habitable worlds. It is the space that is

unbearable. The poem is relieved not to have to live

in it. Instead, its heart ticks perfectly unfretfully

among the trees. The children who are not in the poem

do not cast shadows or spells to make themselves

appear. When they don’t walk through the poem, time

does not bend around them. They are not black holes.

There are already so many nots in this poem, it is already

so negatively charged. The field around the poem

is summoning children and shadows and singularities

from a busy land full of breathing and mass. My non-

children are pulling children away from their own

warm worlds. They will arrive before I can stop them.

When matter meets anti-matter, it annihilates into

something new. Light. Sound. Waves and waves

of something like water. The poem’s arms are so light

they are falling upward from the body. Why are you crying?