Saying the New Grace
- Saying the New Grace
The news says the first baby's been bornfrom a deceased donor's womb. How will it feel to grow up,knowing once that cold& miraculous room? My bet is no one will ask and perhaps not muchto say except, Well, here I am. Gratitude clings above the bus stopin a tree, the thank you-printed plastic baginflating, deflating, a wind-lung. On the screen, my pop-up ads: Freeze your eggs just to beon the safe side! The news says generation Z is the loneliest and that loneliness is the sameas 10 cigarettes a day. The teens are breathingthe fumes of their bright, virtual world. The stream near my house is one I imaginea child would love: tiny minnows, snails.It's an odd polluted green. How it feelsto be the little fish or how they measure the harm of 10 cigarettes,who knows. As a kid, I seldom ate sweet cereal,and my mom made all our meals. Close calls only came later, in cars when I poppedpills whose provenance was mysterious, or escapedhouses of men who'd turned dangerous, though one claim to fame is I neverwas lonely, just in a fantasy I marshalled to be onthe safe side. The viral news cycle dictatesI fixate on The Wall, kids in Walmart holding cells and the truth of Russiannesting dolls: the egg of me having once been enclosedin my mother, even as she waitedin her mother to be born. So now, knowing myself to be a crowd, the next [End Page 34] two generations and I round the corner, trippingthe motion sensor in the freezer aisle, so blip blip blip all the way down: a flickering-on of lights,a dim little dawn. At all times, someone is shining up something nice and false for us to live in. I think frozen pizza is a marvel. I thinkif someone were to askalmost any question, I'd have nothing truer to say than, Here I am. [End Page 35]
Rosalie Moffett is the author of Nervous System, (Ecco/Harper Collins) winner of the National Poetry Series. She is also the author of June in Eden (Ohio State University Press). She earned her MFA in poetry at Purdue University. She has been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, the "Discovery"/Boston Review prize, and scholarships from the Tin House and Bread Loaf writing workshops. Her poems and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Believer, Narrative, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and other magazines. She is an assistant professor at the University of Southern Indiana.
