All in by Amelia Martens

by Amelia Martens

And ask me to put a Christmas pompom in your hair
along with a maroon bow to hold your bun in place.

There is all of breakfast and night across your face
when we leave the house; when we cross the street

your sister wants to talk about gravity
and I am doing math involving trajectory:

if two daughters and their mother step off
this curb now, will they arrive on the other side

before that blue pick-up truck explodes
their bodies in clean clothes and homework?

Why don’t we fall off the surface of the Earth
as our planet spins through space, why don’t

we feel the spin, here on this plate? I make
metaphors with my free hand and conduct

two half conversations at once, without
success. We cross another street and don’t

die and yet, I always feel the sunshine
as a potential threat, my body

your bodies, always under the weight:
a certain level of force exerted to hold us

to the ground, as we are more
dangerous in our space.

I let go your hand, and you run
up the school steps, free radicals.

I turn home, thinking of ice animals
floating off the poles at each end of this ball.

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Amelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat (Sarabande Books, 2016) and four chapbooks, including Ursa Minor (elsewhere magazine, 2018). She is the recipient of a 2019 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. She met her husband in the Indiana University MFA program; together they created the Rivertown Reading Series, Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art, and two awesome daughters.