Personal Weather

Personal Weather

by Emily Skaja

The weather does not belong to you, the billionaire explains, chewing his cud of
regurgitated fifties. I watch him on tv at the doctor’s office as I wait for someone
to mispronounce my name. The billionaire is not as tall as I imagined. I’ve read
that he pays a robot to apologize to him every day, an apology laced with artificial
humiliation sourced from real live humans who have actually felt shame. You’ve been
getting free weather your whole life—you & all the other bottom-feeders, he announces.
To correct this injustice, he’s gone ahead & privatized the weather, but he’s willing
to sell it back to us cloud by cloud. I consider all the weather I have freely used.
Rowing a canoe through lightning at Girl Scout camp. Sunburned summers of
reading in a maple tree. All the Chicago blizzards spent digging out my car. The doctor
calls me in & I carefully assemble my expression into the face of a person deserving of
health care. He refers to me as Mom because I have revealed in my questionnaire that
I would like to have a child. Mom is like a third person in the room with us. Not my
mom, not me, but an entity unto herself, the me who might be, but threatens never to
exist at all. Does Mom’s rotting uterus spark joy? Would Mom pay $20,000 for IVF?
Heavy rain begins outside, pummeling the daffodils for their hubris, & I consider
what it would be like to be responsible for this. If I get in on the ground floor,
someday my grandchildren may own their own April. In a future when butterflies
are illegal. When bees are for patriots. When spring can be accessed through a pay-as-
you-go debit card—that’s when I will fully fuse with Mom. We will live together
as a family somewhere in the void, breathing oxygen on credit, trying to imagine the
existence of fog.

I wrote “Personal Weather” while thinking of “In Those Years” by Adrienne Rich, a poem that considers collective responsibility and imagines how future generations might characterize the failures of the present. Rich's poem was on my mind in early 2025 as I attended fertility appointments and worked to plan a family—indicating, one might assume, some faith in the future—despite daily apocalyptic news alerts about government corruption and evidence of the Trump administration's general apathy toward human suffering. It seemed strangely optimistic and not a little absurd to plan a pregnancy under the circumstances. At the time, the news cycle was reporting on DOGE cuts under the reckless guidance of Elon Musk, with every decision more arbitrary and cruel than the last. There were so many new (and yet tired) ways to be ruthless and self-serving. It made me wonder where it would stop. From the dissonance and absurdity of that situation, I wrote this poem.  

Emily Skaja is the author of BRUTE, winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems appear in The American Poetry Review, The Nation, and The New York Times Magazine. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Skaja is the founding editor of the Poetry Prompt Generator, an online resource for poets and educators, and she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Memphis.