The Baby Boomers are facing extinction
and no longer buying Mother’s Day gifts
for their own mothers. My mother’s mother
is dead and no one will ever buy me
a Mother’s Day gift. It takes two and a half
millennials to equal the archaic traditions
of one boomer, and it takes only one millennial
and a smartphone to ruin precisely everything.
Millennials ruined malls, banks, almonds, avocados,
homeownership, the job market, sexual harassment
in the work place. Millennials made America
change again, made its knees buckle and break.
How many millennials are mothers to more dogs
and cats than babies? When will the Earth simply
suffocate and drop dead from plastic? Earth Day
comes before Mother’s Day in a calendar year
but maybe boomers can send Her cards instead.
I know my refusal to become a mother is a headline,
another millennial on a reusable canvas soapbox.
I know my body is a fraction of what a Boomer
believes a body should be. Babies boomed and
us babies boomeranged—I went to school to
get a job and when there were no jobs, I was
a dummy in debt. Some did become mothers,
some felt there was no other way. How could I
in good conscience, make motherhood my M.O.?
The Big Bang and the Big Boom. The world
as we know it will boomerang back into space.
Every story is always about a planet, a body,
and the journey to find its mother again. Maybe
millennials ruined planets too, and money, and
mortgages, but for every two and a half there’s
one trying to salvage this shithole. There are
tiny houses and Marie Kondo and the purge
of pure waste. It’s in poor taste to say the thing
I want to say. I’ve just been the receiver of
so much vitriol and I don’t know where to dispose
of it without polluting the environment. I am
purging my life of the unnecessary objects.
I am orbiting this change like an old rotary phone.