SARA R. BURNETT

Sara R. Burnett, a 2025 Subnivean Awards finalist, is the author of Seed Celestial (2022), winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. She has been published in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, PANK, RHINO and elsewhere. The recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, she lives in Maryland with her family and she curates Poems to Carry You, a twice-monthly newsletter of 3-5 poems of resilience. Find her at www.sararburnett.com

IS PLUTO A PLANET

Depends on when you ask:

in your lifespan, no, in mine, yes.

One day, a planet, the next —

poof! All the textbooks, wrong.

All the “My Very Eager Mother

Just Served Us Nine Potatoes” and

“Mary’s Violet Eyes Make Johnny Stay

Up Nights Pondering,” useless.

It can happen. Certainty aside,

all the metaphysical rage then, the irate

memes circulating of Pluto’s lonely

dwarf-sized status in the adolescent cybersphere.

People cared. It really mattered what to call

an ice ball — or it mattered that what was

once considered fact was now false.

You were still the stuff of stars.

One day, in my body. The next, outside.

And before? Before the body? My body?

Depends on when you ask. I have always felt

the presence of a person strongest

just after the person has passed

like a gravitational pull, as if nearly touching

our orbit before traveling elsewhere,

some other world, dimension, galaxy far away

and close to ours. Icy world, ocean world,

volcanic world, words used now to describe

those uncategorical places in the universe —

words used to cover up our gaps

of what we think we know and don’t,

and not unlike the cold, dark imaginings

of Pluto’s namesake and his underground realm.

What makes us special, this blue marble

spinning with its 8 billion people and millions

upon millions of variegated species

might depend on when you ask. Not for nothing,

but I think it brave to admit you were wrong

or that your understanding has changed

in some seismic way that the ground

you tread upon is less certain and more dear

both for themselves and your sake.

One day, you were the stars. The next, my world.

ARE THERE VEGETABLES IN THIS?

To which I counter, do you think

there’s vegetables in this?

The line between the real

and imaginary is so fuzzy

at his age that I am still a trusted

keeper of much of his knowledge.

At his age, he plays me in basketball

for real this time, Mama and we tie 1-1

everytime. At his age, he bounces

off other boys like puppies in a pack

when they play army, then hug goodbye.

What he knows of war is a game.

What he knows of the world is a series

of rules and consequences like no dessert

and everyone follows them until you die,

which is a kind of joke where you fling

your body to the ground, say I’m dead,

and close your eyes. There are only two kinds

of people in the world: good and baddies,

but he’s never met one because they wear

flashy suits or have mechanical parts

and say things like I’ll get you next time,

bootypants when they fail to steal

your vibranium. I’ve spent a lot of time

with him in this world, probably more

than anyone else has so far, carefully laying

lego block over lego block, building a tower

so strong and sturdy that no wind or swipe

from a villan’s claw can knock it down.

But, of course, it will come down,

every patient, painstaking piece of it.

Someday too soon, he will see everything

and know about everything I’ve been keeping

from him and I won’t be able to deflect him

with my jujitsu counter questioning.

At his age, he is poking green things in his eggs

with a fork and asking me if what he sees

is real. No, he’s asking me to tell the truth,

come clean about my dirty spinach tricks.

I’m at a loss. You can’t taste it, I say

and even before the words have left my lips,

we both know he won’t buy it.

MOTHER WITH HER HANDS BEHIND HER BACK

Could have been any other day,

the way she called us down impatient,

put her hands behind her back and asked us to guess

which one held the spatula,

which meant which one of us

went first to measure, to stir, to pour.

We’d played this game before.

We wore clean aprons, hats

like the ones in books we read on her lap.

In the kitchen, we mashed bananas.

Added chocolate chips. Then the smell

of bread baking in the oven.

Outside, the smoke-filled sky shaded the sun blood orange.

We wondered about the animals. Were they safe,

like we were?

Our mother licked the spoon, the one,

she said might make us sick.

Could have been any other day

and then it was. What did we know then

of those indoor days spent with her?

What did we know then

of those bright, sticky messes,

the way she made everything

at a distance seem to keep its distance?

ECHOLOCATION

A mammalian marvel for which there are no words for —

how a click, a tap, a trill of high notes pulsating often in dark,

unknowable depths create an image

there are no words for —

a phrase one might also write in a condolence card;

no container for the immense grief of —

or as when my son, red-faced, burbling, says “it hurts”

then points to his chest, extends his arms upward

and says “hold chu,” which I translate as “pick me up”

but I still do not know where or why or how much he hurts.

When I watched the footage of J35, an orca mother, who carried

her dead calf for 17 days, balancing him on her forehead, her back,

clutching him in her mouth — there are no words for;

there is a song, a call, a code inscrutable to us —

as in the vibration of a plucked violin string in an empty concert hall; or

the wind hollowing the inside of a conch shell.

During the pandemic, I learned to crochet for my children on YouTube

from a radiant young mother whom I later learned

died from an aggressive and rare form of cancer.

I can’t say I knew her — I know the cadence of her voice,

her quick hand, a mirror hand I study and play over again even now;

how threads between us touch without ever touching —

there are no words for;

and how I’m moved to tears when I see my daughter

wrap an unfinished scarf (of a pattern the young mother designed)

to wear to bed tonight.

Some phenomena seem only ever rare except when

they locate inaudibly in the body

and spread;

a dark mass submerged

in light gray tissue imaged

by sound to screen to eye.

I listened to the scientist worried about J35, also known as Tahlequah,

list the dangers threatening orca pods: the declining numbers

of salmon to feed on; or noise pollution interrupting their calls; or —

his voice cracked on the line —

I’ve imagined my own death too,

maybe an errant side-swipe in the blind spot on the highway going 70; or

slick black ice under tires; or an undefined lump in my throat.

Then an ocean of blue-black cold, heart-stripped of feeling, floating,

but what I can’t go farther than — what leaves a hole in my chest —

the children I’m tethered to.

Tahlequah, her name derived from the Cherokee “two is enough”

as in a legend where two tribal elders waited for a third who never showed

to place the Cherokee nation’s capital in what is now Tahlequah, Oklahoma;

in what is now considered the geographical end to the Trail of Tears.

What are the sounds of grief

and where do their echoes end?

Perhaps it will all dissolve at once — an ice shelf cracking into the sea; or

more quietly, the sea drowning its shores lick by salty lick.

Perhaps, though unlikely, I’ll be absolved for all the immeasurable ways

my way of living has meant —

for all the innumerable living beings who swam or walked or flew on this earth with me;

bearing their young or not;

holding strings inside this labyrinth.

After seven days, aware that she was sick, other members of the orca pod

took turns floating the calf, so Tahlequah could rest.

Finally, after swimming 1,000 miles, she dropped the weight of her lifeless calf

to the bottom of the Salish Sea to search for food.

When my daughter asks how babies are born, I tell her

about the improbable odds of a tiny seed and an egg — I tell her

what she needs to know for now; in a few days I’ll finish her scarf —

weave the multi-colored strands of yarn with my hook

and think of the generosity of the young mother who taught me

without ever knowing me — there are some holes

that will not close or none that we will see, like a force that circles

and circles and circles, it pulls us close without ever being closer.

There’s so much we don’t have words for — if I close my eyes

there’s a dark sea of sounds bouncing back and forth;

I can’t fathom its depths.

When scientists say up to half of plant and animal species

face local extinction, I can only begin to sensate

to scale what this means by proxy by echo,

a single note at a time —

it’s how I know I’d know my own anywhere

by instinct by design: the smell of her hair;

the pigments of his irises; the sounds

of their footsteps scaling up

the stairs — trust me, my dearest ones,

I swear I could be far from anywhere and hear —

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