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鈥檚 office as I wait for someone
to mispronounce my name. The billionaire is not as tall as I imagined. I鈥檝e 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鈥檝e been
getting free weather your whole life鈥攜ou & all the other bottom-feeders, he announces.
To correct this injustice, he鈥檚 gone ahead & privatized the weather, but he鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥攖hat鈥檚 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 鈥淧ersonal Weather鈥� while thinking of 鈥淚n Those Years鈥� 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鈥攊ndicating, one might assume, some faith in the future鈥攄espite 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. 聽
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 , an online resource for poets and educators, and she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Memphis.