1 minute read
Cecil Morris
Me in Mind
I like to imagine myself an impulse leaping neuron to neuron from your eye or ear or lip—an ionized humming zooming down axons, dividing, multiplying as axons fork and fork again. I like to imagine myself invisible, unbodied electromotive force jumping synaptic gaps, descending dendritic trees—a vaulting volt charging along your neural network, a charged idea you have not yet thought, a shock almost felt. I like to imagine myself surging (nearly fast as light) into your four lobes at once—and on—to thalamus and hypothalamus, to amygdala and hippocampus—and right to your stem— where I change you—your breath, your pulse, your heat— and you (o magic potentiator) convert that current into me—idea to actual. You make me who I am.
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Cecil Morris
Good News, Bad News
When this fourteen-year-old freshman announced that she was pregnant, I had just endured my fourth miscarriage, early this time so no one knew except my husband. We’d had eight weeks of guarded joy and fear, of silent, private prayers and babying my belly as if I might be carrying nitroglycerin or bowl overfilled with water before cramps and blood and tears. Two days off school then back to my classroom: freshmen like puppies with squirrels dropping by and me, a lesser teacher than before, exhausted, aching, crushed by hope’s hard work. And she—this waif, this slip, this hip-less child who looks more like 12 or even 11— she beamed to a gaggle of girls who gathered around her desk and shared her news while I bit back tears. I won’t look pregnant for weeks and weeks, she said to a doubter’s whisper, and then, like a magician revealing the chosen card, she produced the test stick and explained the two red stripes. Speechless, I watched her narrow face, her smiling teeth, her eyes. Somehow my baby had become her baby, and I had to squeeze the edges of my lectern to keep my feet, to keep my hands from slapping her stupid happy face, from clutching my failing, incapable, useless uterus. In that moment I wished her morning sickness and stretch marks, a boyfriend who would flee her and her joy, and agonizing hours of labor.
