1992: Diva, Annie Lennox

By Babette Cieskowski

“How many times do I have to try to tell you that I’m sorry for the things I’ve done?” 

Annie Lennox’s Diva opens with an apology, or as close to an apology anyone is going to get from a Capricorn. Her 1992 album was released five days after my mother’s birthday, thick into Aries season. Lennox’s apology sounds forced, exacerbated, as if she’s already apologized and has had enough. My mother also apologizes like this, in the rare occasions she brings herself to apologize at all. Lennox closes the opening track with a litany of claims, a manifesto-like thread declaring her stance: “and these are the years that we have spent, and this is what they represent, and this is how I feel, do you know how I feel? cause I don’t think you know how I feel, I don’t think you know what I feel… you don’t know what I feel.” As a Cancer sun/Scorpio moon (pray for me), I clung to those lyrics immediately. Her voice a half-built bridge, a paper sailboat quickly disintegrating shortly after being released. I couldn’t say those words to my mother, and she couldn’t say them to me, so we sang together instead, hoping one of us would break first. At the time, I thought all mothers could sing like mine. 

I return to this moment often, singing to myself as if she’s in the room, listening. 

****

At 13, I had a basic understanding of what queerness was—watching The Birdcage on repeat with my mother—the South Beach pastels, the peaches and blues, the open-air pageantry. The joy felt familiar and welcoming, yet distant. It reminded me of Uncle Robert, his thin frame, his soft yet present voice, his feminine, beautiful laugh. I met him once, then he was gone. He died before I knew what HIV was, but I knew no one in my family discussed it. I kept my questions to myself.

“You were the sweetest thing that I ever knew, but I don't care for sugar, honey, 

if I can't have you…”

Riding the bus to school, I hid the plastic CD case in my backpack like an embarrassing secret, its red and silver disc gently placed into my gray Sony Walkman. I remember her gaze, her headdress, the long pink and orange feather boa framing her face like an ancient myth—Selene, Luna—her face half-hidden, looking like someone with silent, gravitational power. I wanted to look like that, to summon it. I wanted to walk into my middle school science class, beaded crown, stone-gaze equipped. I wanted the cute girl with the braids to look at me, laugh, ask what I was listening to—to pluck a feather from my headdress and save it for herself. 

To surrender to a spell I conjured just for her.

****

Doug was a cute, unassuming boy I fixated on during my freshman year of high school. His favorite color was green, and his birthday was in July, three days after mine. After school, I bought a bright, five-dollar Kelly green shirt from Target, the word “Lucky” spread across my chest, leftovers from a St. Patrick’s Day sale. I hated that shirt, but I felt the need to signal something, not knowing exactly what. I would listen to “Cold,” the fifth track on Diva, feeling a specific Cancerian brand of something my 15-year-old self would think was love. I never told him how I felt, and he never asked. I sat beside him every lunch hour, wearing different shades of a color I hated, sweating in Floridian heat, wishing he would hear her singing everything I could never tell him myself, blaring from my cracked, duct-taped headphones.

“Don’t I exist for you? Don’t I still live for you?”

Me, Doug, Anthony, and Matt talked shit every lunch hour. We sat beside endless rows of bleach-white portables, talking about music, girls, how South Florida was a hellscape that we all wanted to escape from, eventually. We’d miss the beaches, but we wanted out. Plantation High was a predominately Black school that sat north of Davie, FL, a town my best friend avoided when she could. Police on horseback in the middle of a city and a colonel as our school’s mascot—the symbols were clear. Doug left PHS before graduation. I kept the shirt longer than I care to admit.

****

I met Iris in my first poetry workshop in college. It was her voice, the way she’d say “Will you read my poem? I know you'll tell it like it is.” I thought I wanted to be her friend, that’s why I’d sit next to her each day, why I’d wait in the hallway for her after class, why I asked about her tattoos, how long did they take and how far does that one go? I can’t remember what types of flowers were on her ribs—if they were flowers at all. Maybe sunflowers—and wasn’t she a Leo? Maybe it was our shared liminal space—not Black enough, not Asian enough, definitely not white, but maybe? Was she straight? Was she smiling at me? I’d sneak lyrics into my poem drafts, coded language for her. My poems were veiled callings, trite cyphers that were less like poems, and more like confessions. 

“Stay by me, and make the moment last … please take these lips even if I have been kissed a million times ...”

**** 

I’m sitting naked from the waist down, waiting for a doctor to examine me. I’ve been told I have dermoid cysts on my ovary, multiple fibroids, tumors that have been growing with me my entire life. Waiting, I begin to catalog all my body’s malfunctions, all the things I did to myself, the culmination of my present body’s concerns: blurry vision from watching VH1 late into the night, witnessing my idols put their bodies through anything in search of joy, of pleasure—pure excess; lower back pain from jogging barefoot on concrete as a teenager, unwilling to lace up my mother’s old, ill-fitting sneakers; high blood pressure from salt, from shoyu, canned corned beef hash, from losing the genetic lottery. The list continues into the night. It lengthens as I’m driving home, as I move from one silence to another, until I find myself in the shower, washing off the lubricant between my thighs, listening to Diva, wondering if we share the same pain, how my mother had me at 24, how young 24 seems now, how she’d sing with no music at all, singing to herself in an unreachable, unknowable place—"Why can’t you see? This boat is sinking, this boat is sinking …”

****

When my nephrologist shows me the size of my kidneys alongside the timeline of their inevitable decline, I think about secrets. I was diagnosed with Polycystic Kidney Disease in June 2021 after a roller-skating accident on the Olentangy Trail. After days of pain and pissing blood, I went to the doctor who proceeded to ask me if I was on my period. Looking back, I wish I had a clever comeback, something cruel and pointed to say to counter her senselessness. I said “I’m 31. This is different.” 

I was told that my hypertension diagnosis in my early 20s should have been my first red flag, should have been someone’s concern, and that I should have had my doctors look into it. At the time, I was living in rural Texas, in wildflower Hill Country, working in a kitchen with no health insurance, and no doctors, deeply in love with a Scorpio who had nothing to offer but pleasure.

PKD is inherited, and it holds a weight that is both slow, heavy, and constantly present. I think about the things my mother’s body has been through, the births, small deaths, and what she has unknowingly passed down to me. I think of her singing the opening line to “Legend In My Living Room,” her voice as powerful as her desire to stay young. 

“When I was just 17, I ran away from home … to be with all the pretty people, to be on my own, yeah…”

I wonder if she was thinking about her kidneys at 17, a runaway living out of her car, bartending at a Maui dive bar, collecting tips from men she’d rip off—drunk tourists who couldn’t tell how much she charged them on their tabs. I hear my mother’s voice alongside Lennox’s, the depth of it, how deliberate and measured her voice sounds when she sings,  “and I believed in everything that everybody told me … have mercy … have mercy on me.” 

I believe her when she says they deserved it. They did.

****

My mother apologizes for what she has given me, what she has unknowingly passed down, bodily or otherwise. I tell her it’s not her fault. I also tell her I am not having children for the same reasons she’s apologizing for, among many other reasons I will never disclose to her. 

I think of all the small ways the world can harm a child, a person, slowly, with intention. I think of all the things my own body has hidden from me, the secrets my body keeps from itself until it makes its presence unwelcomely known. I’ve made a list of what’s killing me, swallowed it, felt it dissolve—passed down to no one. I don’t apologize for this. Like my mother, I sing to my never-born daughter, secret odes to a life not chosen, never revealed. This is my gift to her, to myself, a freedom I hear when she sings, “take this gilded cage of pain and set me free, take this overcoat of shame, it never did belong to me, it never did belong to me.” 

Somewhere, she’s statuesque—red-lipped and piercing, motherless, her feather boa draped around her neck like a woman with unearthly ties, transcending—her voice a river between what has killed her, and what keeps her free.

Born in Oahu, Hawaii, Babette Cieskowski has lived in South Florida, Kitzingen, Germany and Central Texas. She currently lives in Columbus, Ohio where she earned her MFA in Poetry from The Ohio State University. Her poems have appeared in Compose, the minnesota review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Zone 3, Frontier Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, Juked, The Laurel Review, among others. She currently works with The Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project (OPEEP). Grounded in prison abolition, the project works to increase access to higher education for incarcerated individuals within Ohio prisons.