“When a woman with certain privileges is about to give birth there’s a slog of learning. Guides in print and thousands of websites. Most of which do not entertain other outcomes. Gradually, you pick it up, the knack of counting your life in weeks. Consider buying one of the many new books on motherhood, mostly by middle-class white women. You learn what it means to [redacted]. You feel the energy quietly being sapped away from you and the plurality of an internal conversation. When you inform the midwife you’re opting for a consultant-led birth, she’s surprised that “an intelligent woman like you would make that decision”. You throw her a forced smile. What must it be like to see you or some version of you over and over day after day. Making the wrong decisions. Not quite English. The NHS leaflets piled thick in your palm. The hostile posters on the wards threatening those without legal status. This woman of the State is disappointed in you. But, anyway, you never see her again. You stop talking to your selves.”
Living in a country where femininity is so closely tied to the marketing of motherhood and family life, I value the writers who walk into the most painful parts of the womb space. I need their words in my head when I see an ad that sells me children. I need their voices to remind of what lies beneath the silence. I need a world that acknowledges both the beauty and the terror of life inside a female body.
And to acknowledge these—now.
Tara Isabel Zambrano’s “Piecing” (TriQuarterly)
Ingrid Jendrzejewski’s “The Miscarriage: A Poem” (Mutha Magazine)
Chelsea Dingman’s “How All Things Are Managed” (Palette Poetry)
Sandeep Pramar’s “An Uncommon Language” (The Poetry Review)
Dorothea Lasky’s “Miscarriage” (Poetry)
Allíe Marini’s “Two Pounds, Two Ounces” (Obra / Artifact)
Chloe Yelena Miller’s “Mammal’s Cries” (Dying Dahlia Review)
Linda Dove’s “Fear Is A Walk Through Immovable Trees” (Cease, Cows)
Zoë Brigley Thompson’s “Star / Sun / Snow” (Mothers Always Write)
Emma Bolden’s “House Is the Word My Doctors Used for My Body” (The National Poetry Review)
Laura Turner’s “Missing Hope: A Trio of Miscarriages, and What Happened After” (Catapult)