Bianca Stone

Luck

What if I’m not lucky enough
to have your children, and instead
I have nothing to give except
my head, whirling around
in the caves of American households—
that what I can give to you
will be only
my various triggers—and what if
I just end up letting them
trigger me to death
and I drift out, never passing down
bacteria, or the bluntness of my nose,
the tendencies that make me up?
And what does luck matter
in this universe
where everything reproduces
until it is obliterated?
Even when whole civilizations
are wiped out
distant suns have their planets
spreading slowly away from them
like teenagers, eventually
leaving their orbit—
I doesn’t really matter, does it
that I’m thinking about my luck.
That I hang it around my neck
in rings of cold iron. That I make
my living off of it.

Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist. Her books include the poetry collection Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books 2014), Antigonick, a hybrid collaboration with Anne Carson (New Directions 2012), and an ongoing poetry comic-book series from Factory Hollow Press. She is co-founder/editor of the press Monk Books, and runs the Ruth Stone Foundation in Vermont and Brooklyn.