Opening Ceremony
by Laura Marie Marciano
Metatron Press
64 pages
$18
Laura Marie Marciano’s second poetic memoir, Opening Ceremony, will hit uncomfortably close to home for many aging Millennials—and Marciano does not hold back. Composed with the same candor and confessional pathos of her debut collection, Opening Ceremony navigates a world of recessions, a global pandemic, missed fertility windows, and a bleak economic future.
“I wish we could just do something to become less poor,” Marciano laments. The sentiment is a hallmark of the times we live in, where the thought of owning a home—much less a backyard with a pool—is absurd. “I think of your nephew who said he had flowers / in his yard / but they belonged to the landlord,” she quips in the very first poem of the book. Marciano’s unfiltered honesty sets the tone for the rest of the collection, where she effortlessly oscillates between humorous and tragic commentaries on the “commercial deceits” of modern life—whether it’s Botox injections and lip fillers, Apple watches and Tom Ford cologne, or the stark juxtaposition of an Amazon warehouse towering over an impoverished community in Tijuana.
Refreshingly candid in sharing her own vulnerable reality as a non-tenured adjunct professor, Marciano reveals that, at five months pregnant, she was told via an automated email that her contract was not renewed. “Laura, haven’t I punished you enough? A child in this economy?” she asks herself in the title poem. In another nod to the parenthood dilemma of having children in uncertain times, she calls her first-born niece a “blue-chip investment / that her daddy can not afford.”
Yet through the pain and disappointment, Marciano finds there is redemption to be found in deep love. It’s friends sitting together in a café in a downpour; a wife dedicating this entire poetry book to her husband; or, simply, two soon-to-be parents agreeing on a beautiful name for their baby. Opening Ceremony brings to us a glimmer of hope in all the chaos. It reminds us that love is everywhere, echoed through references like Baz Luhrmann’s iconic Romeo + Juliet and Celine Dion’s ballad “My Heart Will Go On.” At the crux of the narrative is the birth of a child, of making way for something new—an opening ceremony in itself. Love “softens this curve of our lives,” as Marciano puts it. After all, regardless of how “crazy” things get, “didn’t we / all believe in love?”
