Imagine going through two miscarriages. Imagine then having a beautiful baby girl, so beautiful and perfect that you decide to have another baby. Imagine being told you’re having twins, a boy and a girl. Then, imagine going into labor at 24 weeks, and losing your baby boy. And then, imagine it all away. What happens when you pull a single thread out of a braid? Multiverses, a speculative memoir in verse, explores that possibility, telling the real story of what happened to one family over the course of just four years, and then untelling and retelling it in various different ways.
Imagine going through two miscarriages. Imagine then having a beautiful baby girl, so beautiful and perfect that you decide to have another baby. Imagine being told you’re having twins, a boy and a girl. Then, imagine going into labor at 24 weeks, and losing your baby boy. And then, imagine it all away. What happens when you pull a single thread out of a braid? Multiverses, a speculative memoir in verse, explores that possibility, telling the real story of what happened to one family over the course of just four years, and then untelling and retelling it in various different ways.
In the NICU,
they try to reassure me
with stories of babies
born at 23 weeks
who have survived                                              Â
just like you and I,
no mark of this struggle
of wires and buttons,
dials and digital heartbeats.
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Born at 27 weeks, Arturo
is more fetus than baby.
I gasp the first time I see them,
my twins, Arturo and Sara.
In the violet light of the incubator,
I struggle to make out the color
of their hair or their eyes.
The only way I can tell them apart
is that Sara’s hat has a jaunty bow.
Try to remain positive, they say.
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They let me change their diapers.
Arturo’s eyes slit slightly open,
flash of black, amphibious.
I give him the tip of my finger
and his hand curls around it,
like a kitten’s paw. He is intubated,
the tape covering his lower face
like a mask. His chest is covered
by sensors. Even the preemie diaper
reaches to his armpits.
.
All that I can see,
because they cannot cover it
in order to have a place from which
to draw blood, is his left foot,
a bulbous big toe standing straight
up in the air, just like mine.
Just like mine. This is my son.
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Even when the crash cart comes in,
even when I can no longer tell
which doctor can save him,
I believe that things will turn around.
When the beep of his heartbeat
goes silent, I clutch my husband and
watch my son turn purple, beginning
with his toe. This is my son,
Â
I say to myself, when I
can finally hold him, free
from tubes and tape. I think
of the multiverse theory,
wondering what version of me
can hold him alive and breathing.
what version of me
can take him home,
can watch him grow.
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Sara’s hair is golden,
her eyes a streaming blue river.
She squeals with laughter
as my mother makes her
airplane sounds with her spoon.
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I think of that version of me
where there are two toddlers,
skin so white you can see
their map of veins. I trace
Sara’s blue highways to her
big toe, bulbous, alert, ready
to spring into action.
Multiverses is an interesting collection of poems, which read more like life snippets in the main, due to the freeness of the form that Celia Lisset Alvarez has chosen. They constitute a series of memories and recollections interspersed with imaginings of what life would be like in a parallel universe if the reality had been different, in verse form.
Due to the style of the poetry, these poems are very easy to access and provide a very honest view of relationships and loss and the tensions that exist in any family, especially one which has to deal with the loss of a child.
I think that poetry is a very personal form of writing and having shared some of the experiences that Alvarez has faced, I found that a lot of the events described and sentiment explored in the poems resonated with me. Her style is very direct with a sparseness of imagery and I get the sense that the poems are a form of catharsis, that now that she has time to breathe, she is able to give a voice to her emotions with a view to coming to terms with the reality of her losses.
The poems that I liked the most and formed the peak of the collection for me were Version 0.44 ,Version 0.45 and Version 0.46 as they are full of strong emotion with a less muted tone and stand out from the rest of the verses, packing a powerful poetic punch.
Anyone who has experienced difficulty conceiving or who has lost a child or indeed has had an uneasy relationship with their father will find echoes of their own life here in these pages, highlighted by Alvarez’s shared words. And Alvarez’s sharing goes some way to providing comfort and understanding to parents who have found themselves in the same situation, to know that you are not the only one out there who feels this way.
That is the strength of this collection: the honest and brave articulation of traumatic life events through simple accessible verse.