- Olivia Brooks
- Oct 23
- 2 min read
Updated: Oct 30
It's the stage of grief where
I become convinced by conspiracy theories.
Everyone is mistaken. Elvis is alive.
I saw him in Memphis at the Spirit Halloween.
Over lunch, dining with the impersonator
of Avril Lavigne, he said in fact the earth
is flat, & of course I believed him.
Why wouldn’t I?
He’s killed every Kennedy he could find
& no one ever guessed it was him.
I’ve been on hold for hours
trying to renew my Saturn return
when finally I yell JESUS CHRIST
CONNECT ME TO A PERSON
enough times that an actual person
shows up to my house in concern.
“What would you do,” I ask the woman—
who turns out to be Beyonce’s
psychic ambassador to the Illuminati—
“hypothetically, if you were me?
If you’d spent your whole maidenhood
fucking around, tying yourself to the railroad tracks
& now you can’t have a baby
& you’re not due for your Agatha Christie era
for another 20 years?”
The psychic says I’m not inviting abundance
into my life—that’s my whole problem,
I can’t stay pregnant because I’m not
cultivating an “Environment of Plenty,”
whatever that is. I tip her $500
& she says Yes! Just like that.
I feel confident my baby will arrive
in the mail within 5-10 business days. 11, max.
Since I get all my medical information
from roadside billboards in Arkansas,
I believe God would make me a baby
out of nothing if he really wanted
my attention. Sure, maybe my womb
doesn’t work, but he’s God.
He could grow a baby in a boob.
Anything is possible.
The craziest theory of all
is that I can break my heart over & over
& still be alive to joke about it.
If we can fake a man on the moon,
maybe I can survive this year.
EMILY SKAJA is the author of BRUTE, winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, The Nation, and The New York Times Magazine. She 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.