Poetry Tuesday: "Cassandra Visits the Fertility Clinic"

 In all the Inauguration news of last week, all the various work ups and downs, I forgot to mention a publication.  I was happy to get my copy of Gargoyle, which published one of my Cassandra poems.

Cassandra is one of the figures from Greek myth to whom I return again and again.  As I was thinking about this poem's publication after I got my contributor copy of the journal, I got the idea for another one, Cassandra visiting her spiritual director and trying to use centering prayer--so let me note that, for a day when I feel like I have no more poems to write ever.

I was thinking of this poem, of Cassandra in the modern age, of the idea of the future in a time when the future seems so fraught with peril.  Does the future always seem fraught with peril?  It has in my lifetime, although the nature of the peril has shifted.

Would Cassandra, with her vision of the future, keep her eggs?  This poem attempts to answer that question: 

Cassandra Visits the Fertility Clinic 

Cassandra flies to Minneapolis, her annual 

pilgrimage to visit 

her frozen, fertilized eggs. 

She sees this storage 

facility as an an extravagant luxury 

in an age of rising 

seas and record 

shattering heat. She understands 

the cost of her clenching 

grasp and insistence on open options. 

Still, she cannot release 

these eggs, either to fallow 

wombs or to the sewer. 

Her Catholic upbringing and her guilty 

sense of failed femaleness 

forbid her to sign the forms. 

And so she pays for freezer 

space and back up generators 

and monitoring of all sorts. 

During boring meetings, she designs 

the nursery she will likely never need.