Curated by Karolina Zapal The birthing room is a liminal space. It changes us in ways we imagined and never could have imagined. In the room where I gave birth, I hemorrhaged and a midwife dove elbow-deep into my uterus to retrieve a retained placenta. My daughter was born two weeks early on the only date I didn’t want her to be born due to its connection with a less-than-great day in U.S. history. As a new mother with a body remolding itself, I entered a new realm of experience. I was reborn. Physically giving birth to a human…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Jessica Barlevi [After the first child, I knew] After the first child, I knew. The prize at the end of the pregnancy is not the child. It is the stay. On the maternity ward. Where it is warm and dim and calm. Where they hand out stool softeners like candy. Sparingly. Placing one small capsule on the lifeline of your palm. Meaty smell of afterbirth, resins risen from decay, dank earth. The hush of the hall. A lone woman looks lost. Like she’s woken from a coma, inhaled smelling salts. Inside the cove of her floral robe she holds…
Olivia Brochu When One Thing Ends We pull weeds. Grip their green leaves. Pry from their base. Hope to expunge their white, spiny roots. They reach out from their hosts like the fine and unruly postpartum hairs growing back around my head. The roots and my hairs are both spindly, wild and delicate. My 6-year-old son teams up with me. He names the big ones daddy weeds. He calls them strong when he struggles to pull them out of the ground. It reminds him of his father. Of his father’s muscled arms that still sometimes need to hold him…
Jennifer Case The Machinery Is In Order But We Are Still Fearful Jennifer Case is the author of The Carework Project: Reckoning with Love, Labor, and the Living World (forthcoming from Trinity University Press), We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood (Trinity University Press, 2024), and Sawbill: A Search for Place (University of New Mexico Press, 2018). She teaches at the University of Central Arkansas and serves as an assistant nonfiction editor at Terrain.org. You can find her at www.jenniferlcase.com.
Amy Dryansky Flowers That Bloom Early & Disappear They Call Ephemeral Witch hazel unfurls its ragged, yolk-yellow stars, ++++++& herons arrive, awkward bodies hunched astride their haphazard nests ++++++empty & silent for now, but soon— & robins return puffed up, strutting, ++++++to yank at whatever dares emerge from the dirt, & the light is back, inching up the horizon, ++++++at close of day a different slant, & the shadblow buds bloom as the actual shad spawn ++++++in the river & everywhere, water, rushing down hillsides, filling ponds ++++++where frogs crawl out of the cold mud to racket their flag…
Laura Foley A Trace of Smoke If I had a son who was forty-one and willing to listen, I’d call him on his birthday and say: I remember— the scent of wood smoke on a pale September morning, how you wailed in my arms without nursing, then dropped into that deep newborn sleep as if sliding back toward a place softer, safer than Earth. And though I tried to hold you against every sharp edge of pain, I failed, again and again, through all those long years— I’d tell him, if he wanted to hear. Yet still, I’m grateful…
Mary Fontana Delivered —an instant late we look where the gulls have gathered, shrieking, the shredded knot now drawing open, its center red and wet, the just-calved creature anonymous already, one more newborn on the seal-tiled beach: a stone heaved bodily from hush to honk and squall, to crush, to quarry, a vessel wrecked on earth— and struck like bells our hearts swing on their rope as an auction block of beaks carves up the afterbirth Mary Fontana is the author of Strangers in the Province of Joy, a narrative history of migration across the US-Mexico border. Her writing has…
MR Sheffield 1-800-PREGNANT WOMAN i. we’re told pregnant women are greeting cards diffuse glow filtered lighting soft amber reality is lacework electrified nerve endings but don’t say that aloud images require careful curation a museum of pregnant ladies smoothing shea butter over tight skin hello do you want this nevermind ii. the blood and the amniotic fluid and the shit and the vernix and the meconium and the IV and the stitches and the catheter and the infections and the slow slow healing some women say they’re up and walking around Target the next day that very…
Therese Gleason Some Defining Moments in Several Instances of Conception, Gestation and Birth: A (Personal) History To conceive (verb) 1. become pregnant with (a child) The first time I got pregnant on the first try. It was almost mystical; I peed on the stick at dawn on the fifth anniversary of my father’s death, crying when the second line materialized, bright pink. The second time took months. Diagnosis: luteal phase defect, my menstrual cycle too short, womb shedding its nest too soon for a fertilized egg to implant. I took Clomid, which caused chemically induced mood swings but didn’t…
Sian Maciejowski Where All Seas Are the Same I’m standing at the edge again. From inside me comes salt, a cry, a wingbeat too soft to name. There is no answer, only the return of morning. Two women hover beside me— one with the ache of milk, the other with her hands still empty. Both are me. A baby bird totters toward the foam, its small feet learning risk, its mouth full of sky. How can something so new already belong to the wind? Behind me, the ghosts of women who never turned back fold their towels, smooth the…