On KJZZ's SOAPBOX, The Show turns over the the mic to listeners. For the fall 2022, writers tackled the theme SORRY.

Monica D. Spencer/Arizona Republic

Melissa Dunmore

I’m sorry you haven’t met her.

It’s one of the wettest monsoon summers on record. I am in my rainy season. Milk is sweet, tears are salty, and parenthood sometimes stinks. Somehow an umami all its own, with subtle notes to savor. Supported by an evergreen ensemble, I still notice each of you who are missing.

When I nurse her to sleep at night, thoughts turn torrential in the time warp. In the liminal let-down, I would be remiss if I didn’t remember any of you …

And so night after night, here I sit in an heirloom rocking chair, in a curated room. Queen of my domain within the silence of my secrets like La Cosa Lacrimosa, harnessing my ghosts.

I’m sorry you died before she was born. You hung in, herculean. I ponder about what birth is like in reverse — the afterlife. And I wish you were here, to protect and perceive me as precious.

I’m sorry your pride poisons proximity. The onus is not on me to cross the chasm created. I imagined your paternal presence would exist for us and honestly your absence is awful.

Keosha Miller

Melissa Dunmore

I’m sorry you deride anything good that comes my way. The hatred you heap is hard to ignore. And yet, tumbleweeds from our barren bond roll across the landscape of my memory, uninvited. When I sneak out of her room on tippy-toes I recall how we played hide-and-seek as kids — and all the things I taught you only to find you now so lost. I think how we both have daughters and the myriad ways things could have been different. Seances can call upon the dead, but what ceremonial closure exists for the living left with no choice but to cull?

There are times I struggle with a sadness I can’t swallow. When I choke on apologies you’ll never say, shouldering sorrow and a story I can’t fake. So I write about what we can’t work out. I’m sorry none of you have met her. Felt the sun of her easy smile. Beheld innocence incarnate like impossibly supple skin. How you aren’t a lucky satellite in her orbit.

Cactus mama, the reserves of water in me hide in plain sight beneath an imposing and impenetrable facade. I am a garden of grief. A statuesque Saguaro, her serpentine safeguard, and mountain range of mighty motherhood. The shelter from your storm.

I am unapologetic about lots of things like lacking the interest to climb the corporate ladder, not giving a FOMO about downtown, for not taking a drink or grabbing a wink because I fear I might miss something monumental in miniature. But I do feel genuinely sorry for you.

We can’t meet the moments together. It makes me sad and I wonder if it makes you sad, too. It probably doesn’t and that is even sadder.

I’m sorry you haven’t met her. The child reborn inside this child. The child that is me.

Melissa Dunmore is a guardian of diasporic narratives and matriarch-in-training. A spoken word artist, author,and activist originally from Brooklyn, New York, with roots in rural Puerto Rico, she transplanted to the Arizona desert more than 15 years ago. Her work explores themes of intersectional identity, diaspora and motherhood.