Sarah Carson
Perhaps the woman at the front desk of the Holiday Inn does not know that history lives in the nervous system—that if you startle my mother awake, it’s not the immediate rousing that panics her, but what has appeared at her bedside previously.
In lab tests, scientists have taught mice to fear the scent of a cherry blossom by shocking their tiny feet each time they encounter the aroma.
Generations removed, their descendants still carry extra cherry-blossom-detecting neurons in their pre-frontal lobes.
Now if each morning I take a tiny tablet meant for nerve patients—to block the misfires between what has happened and what is in front of me—who knows whose memories my body is channeling?
Once the medication washes through me, I can forget all of it: my car keys, my wallet, the way my father once held my tiny shoulders like a grappling dummy, and the number to the hotel room where I slept last night.
So here I am, admitting to the woman at the counter that I don’t know where I’ve come from or where I’m going. She snaps to attention, sorts through a file of single-sheet folios as if she’s disarming a pocket nuke, laughs the knowing laugh of a woman with a system.
She raises the map of emergency exits to shield the shape her mouth makes in whisper: “Two. Two. Three,” she says, a secret between us, while several feet south of us a line of men in work boots pile paper plates with microwave sausage, eggs.
She adds: “I just didn’t think you’d want all those men to know your room number.” And she laughs again, until I, too, am laughing, because laughter, too, is autonomic, both stress response and stress relief.
Like the afternoon in the 24-hour grocery store, when a coworker pulled his cock out behind pallets of 2-liters in a drop trailer, and I wasn’t sure what to do, except to giggle, to distract us both with the absurdity of its presence.
“But why were you laughing,” the grocery manager asked later, upon reviewing the surveillance video.
What more can you do when you don’t know what’s about to happen?
It’s funny, isn’t it?
Every domitable thing, a punchline.
It’s a joke.
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Sarah Carson is the author of several poetry collections, including How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan (2022), winner of the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books. Her poetry and other writing has appeared in The Slowdown, Guernica, Prairie Schooner and Gulf Coast, among others. She is also the inaugural poet laureate of the Kobayashi Society for the Appreciation of Hot Dogs. You can read more of her work at stuffsarahwrote.com.