Michelle Bonczek Evory End of the World Weather

I am sometimes embarrassed to be human. My inability to work out and eat greens every day, to drive finally to the post office, send the electric can opener we bought for Christmas to a friend. It is April.

Unfolded laundry in the corner basket, stack of magazines unread on the dusty table, images of what

Coleridge called “end of the world weather” glaring from their covers. For him, it was the loss of sky to a volcanic eruption.

For us, it is the loss of everything else. I signed up for a yoga class and misread the time, entering the hot room during Shivas Ana. While others stretched their last breath into stillness, I cowered in child’s pose, only beginning.

I’m nearing 47 and contemplating motherhood. I’m not great at making decisions. I struggle with bleu cheese or ranch let alone having a baby, becoming a mom, and now with surrogacy no longer an option since Russia invaded

Ukraine, where surrogates cost $200k less than in the US, I am even more unsure. My ache is not that war, but it is a type of war. Today, before I learned of the massacres in Bucha, I woke dreaming of my old friend Rob Buchta whom I hadn’t thought of in decades. Our psychic minds reach far beyond our bodies. In Bucha, women’s bodies, children’s bodies burning in mass graves, I had to retreat to the woods. The fog kept my eyes on the small grey rocks, grasses, the rare Snow Plants emerging from winter’s cold—how lucky I was to see them: pink arrows, bright red nipples. Someone had kicked one open, of course. Inside, split, flesh like an artichoke. I’d seen some kids ahead on the trail, imagine their black boots swiping the plant so rare, it is federally protected. Every time

I come close, a bell smatters the trance. We are all eggs within eggs within eggs, the heart knocking harder until the perfect shell is fractured by desire, curiosity, the will or what is this tendency to destroy that which is beautiful, that which is strange, whatever it is that is not us, but the thing is it actually is us, broken, split, burning, rare.

Before the freak show under big tents, the freak show down street, under sheets, in the woman. Images of alligators, two-headed pigs, the mythical creatures that emerge from our imaginations, in the beginning, emerged from the womb. Surely, they are in me somewhere. Some connect at the head, some share a pelvis, liver, throat. Most are stillborn, but sometimes, they survive.

In Minnesota, two girls share one body—four lungs, two hearts, two stomachs, two spines. A third arm is surgically removed from their back. For nine months inside the mother, each cell moving closer and closer. . . to that.

At a friend’s bridal shower I met a woman whose baby was born brainless because she ate too much sugar while pregnant. At first I was irked she turned down a piece of the beautiful cake: pink roses, bluebells, butterflies swirled in buttercream, a garden brought forth with sugar because, I assumed, she was watching her weight, already she was so thin. For years we tried, hoped for something to form. Friend after friend conceived, gave birth, miscarried once, twice, and here we were: eating, drinking, sleeping—what does one do if not nurse a wailing child with raw, bruised tits, kiss a mouth that teaches itself to say mama, dada? Stroke gently the two-headed monster that teaches you, one cell at a time, to love?

By root, by petal, by sword

They grew on roadsides, first in bunches like families, where asphalt hinged on plain. Some claimed they had to be seeded by human will, their placement too perfect, too symmetrical to be random, but in the deepest sense, they were wild, wild in their perfume, intoxicating in their rouge electrifying synapses of passersby who’d swoon their cars, unclasp seatbelts and rip them out— mothers from root to be resettled into soil, showcased in pots glazed with the colors of Mexico, Honduras, Brazil, other countries where people danced and sang in the streets, men by stem wrapped in bright paper, presented in sheaths like swords to the women they loved, children petal by petal to crush and darken in their endlessly damp hands.

They grew, they grew. Single, paired. Widowed. Nobody could decide what to name them. For to name them was to lose them, a lack tongued into tragedy because their extinction, like all of ours, allowed them to live on as absence, translucent in the imaginations of those who could never keep them alive, and by those, I mean we who tried.