Facing Pages

Published in Perceptions Magazine of the Arts (2024)

The World Book arrived,
all the volumes at once,
along with a special-offer
bookcase with angled shelves
that tipped the world up to me.

Cross-legged on the floor of my room,
my mother and I unwrapped each
cellophaned book one by one
and ordered the universe
from aardvark to zygote.

I plunged in—
a sixth grade report on the Milky Way,
where Volume M led me
to Volume G (galaxy),
which is when it happened:

there, on the facing page,
a photo of “marine iguanas,”
wonderfully hideous mini-rexes
with curved claws and turquoise crests,
illustrated the entry “Galapagos Islands.”

I read about 500-pound turtles,
miniature penguins,
daisies the size of trees, and
from that moment,
I have been drawn most
to whatever I wasn’t looking for—
distractions, decoys, wrong turns.

Not surprising that
when they arrived,
I took an immediate dislike to
search engines with
their tunnel vision.

Yes, a search for “galaxy” will lead you
to a fine Wikipedia entry on galaxies,
and yes, this entry will offer portals
to transport you to interstellar gases,
dark matter, magnetic clouds, the intergalactic
medium, the Big Bang, black holes,
spiral nebulae, even Greek myth—
which tells us it is Hera’s spilt breast milk
that made the heavens shimmer—
giving us the “Milky Way.”

But no amount of chasing
galactic links will
lead you to
marine iguanas.

I remember this now, decades later,
as my firstborn hands me a luminescent
photo of the Milky Way, taken in the
darkness of our Big Sur canyon,

and how, when I was expecting,
I had no interest in learning the genders
of my future children—or more accurately,
that I had an interest in not knowing,
in letting them reveal themselves to
me in their own time, their own way
without labels, or expectations.

How I would have enjoyed
(if gender reveal parties had been a thing then)
to have released a rainbow of balloons
up to the heavens,
while joyously announcing,

It’s a blue-footed booby,
a blue-footed booby,
or perhaps a tortoise,
or maybe a marine iguana!