CNF: Certainties
by Jill Michelle
after Regi Claire’s “(Un)certainties”
Before the social worker shows up
- eight-year-old me stands in Dad’s laundry room, stripped of the new dress I’ve worn out to play, grass-stained when Mom said it was supposed to be saved. Braced for pain, I stare at the Cheer box, imagine myself lost, its rainbow logo sweeping me away as Susan, our new step-mom, drops the blue bundle into the wash, apologizes before doling out her punishment—one light swat to my flower-undied bum. I can’t help the laughter that foams up when she finishes. Her mouth, a soap-bubble O, when I ask, That’s it? That’s all you’ve got?
- back at home my brother and I climb into the attic space to talk where we think Mom won’t hear us, navigate the plywood planks in sneakered feet, avoid the fluffy pink rising through the cracks, cotton-candy-sea of insulation surrounding us with what looks sweet, its prickles invisible until the sting. We’ll tell the social worker we want to live with Dad. Leave it at that—we agree.
- Mom shouts from the stairs in her best Sunday dress: Are your rooms ready? Social worker’ll be here any minute. We race up to find her mascara-streaked again, pulling the daisy comforter tighter on my already-made bed. I don’t know what I’ll do if you guys leave. Kill myself, I guess.
- my brother who knows I’m the one who first told reminds me, This is all your fault.
- We have to stay with Mom.
- all of the above
Jill Michelle’s latest works appear/are forthcoming in Hawai`i Pacific Review, LEON Literary Review, New Ohio Review, ONE ART and Red Flag Poetry. Her poem, “On Our Way Home,” won the 2023 NORward Prize for Poetry. She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Find more of her work at byjillmichelle.com.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Certainties”? Encountering Regi Claire’s “(Un)certainties” in the The Forward Book of Poetry 2021, I was impressed with the poet’s use of the multiple choice format in the roughly eight-page piece to explore the possibilities of what might have happened to her family member, who died in a tragic accident without clarity of detail. To draft “Certainties,” I used an inversion of that approach, writing just one question in the prose poem, instead of many as Claire had, and focusing on a situation where the speaker had too much information about a traumatic event instead of too little.
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