CHICAGO-

Recently I visited a friend staying at the Four Seasons Chicago. This was a new experience for me. I usually stay at hotels where “room service” is code for “vending machine.” Among the things you can have sent to your room, free of charge, at the Four Seasons are: a humidifier, a thermometer, the bellhop (shaven and bound), and a loaner swimming suit. This last item intrigued me. I imagined the concierge forcing a lifeguard to strip so I could go swimming.

When the swimsuit arrived, I was disappointed to discover it was just a pair of men’s trunks in my size. Apparently, someone expected me to actually go swimming.

(more…)

NEAR 91 DEGREES LONGITUDE-

I confronted eschatology too young. Although benign compared to some beliefs, my Catholic upbringing placed me at the sidelines of Armageddon—strange references to a kingdom come, the Second Coming, Judgment Day. I got queasy at the mention of the Book of Revelations. Sermons and syntactically-strained Bible readings led me to infer a tremendous destructive end to all life, human, animal, insect, plant. There were drawings in books, filled with fire, angels and demons, a sea of the damned. For a child, it’s impossible to reconcile a loving Father with one who will kill every one of his children with wanton violence. Children also don’t grasp metaphor.

(more…)

COLUMBIA, MD -

Here they are in Disney World with matching princess-mouse hats. The sun shines warmly on their painted faces this November afternoon.

Grace, eight years old, loud mouthed, freckled, athletic, proud, and protective, stretches her arms across the railing behind her. Her chin is high, and the blue sky stretches into eternity behind her as she gazes thoughtfully into the distance, but out of the corner of her eye, she checks you out and sizes you up. The star on her forehead marks her as a visionary.

Little sister Leah smiles sweetly into the camera. Her dark wavy hair falls around her shoulders, her head tilts with affection for the photographer, their silly Uncle John. She is a butterfly to be sure, lovely and elusive, flitting past and becoming something new every second.

(more…)

BOULDER, CO-

It was early in the morning.  Lori answered the phone and handed it to me.  My father’s voice.

“Uche…there’s been a terrible…”

“Uche…you should know…”

A pause as gruesome guesswork played through my mind.  I wanted to hear rather than continue imagining, but did I really want to hear?  He drew a constricted breath, and it came in a wave before his voice broke.

“Uche, Chika died tonight.  Imose died tonight.  Little Anya is just barely hanging on…”

Died.  Died.  Barely hanging on.

My nieces.

(more…)

MIAMI BEACH, FL-

Of all my children, Sara was the one who excelled in adventurous eating. The top two were only 14 months apart, so I can time when I learned this fact precisely. Lonny was all skinny legs and dead weight in my front carrier and Sara was no more than 15 months old.

Sara was playing in the bedroom with her imaginary friend, Jack, who lived under the bed. I was in the kitchen and thought to look in on her since she was unusually silent. She and Jack were usually quite boisterous.

As I entered the front hall I met up with Sara. Her mouth was all chocolaty and she was holding what appeared to be a Baby Ruth. She was chewing. She was smiling.

(more…)

BOULDER, CO-

Mitochondrial DNA is a profound, primeval truth.  As far back as all the creatures we can see with our naked eye, ourselves included, it’s meant that the blueprints for the energy of our lives are passed only through the lines of mothers.  Poetry is all about such profound truths.  Sometimes those truths possess lives in cruel ways.  Sylvia Plath is known as a writer and a woman who killed herself.  Her daughter became a writer.  Her son has just killed himself.  A tragic purification of the mitochondrial line.  It so happens that Sylvia’s imagined rival, mistress of her husband Ted Hughes, and Sylvia’s rival to the dramatic (but not poetically) minded, also killed herself, and her daughter with Hughes.  But that is soap opera, not poetry.

(more…)

SARANAC LAKE, NY-

I have been staring at a mobile above my head for the last 10 minutes—birch bark cranes twisted up like origami, strung from the brittle twigs of a dead tree branch.

At first, it seems simple enough—graceful, even.

But I am lying on the exam table, naked from the waist down, with a blue square of fabric draped over me.

I imagine the women who stare at this mobile—babies to be born, babies that won’t reach full term, deformities, disappointments, twins, triplets, and stillborns.

The cranes wobble in someone else’s despair.

(more…)