Hannah Faith Notess
Viviparity
I watched my body fail silently
as if from a great distance. Time to admit those months
I hadn’t created anything of note,
I was just existing like the mammal that I am
damp and diurnal, doing its ritual.
Just read anybody’s birth story online.
There was pain and blood and probably beeping
but I wanted to be more than a vessel. Also I wanted
to be less than a vessel. I wanted to be the monitor
at the back of the room, beeping regularly,
the screen no one was watching. I wanted
what everyone else wanted: bloodlessness, but also
the normal amount of blood, which is a lot.
I didn’t want to scream, or to squat
in the center of the room. I wanted very much
to be able to squat, but couldn’t. The monitor
dipped, and dropped. The connection faltered.
I gripped the oxygen.
I felt like Christ on the cross, some girl wrote
in a mass email to every woman she knew
and we laughed at her where she couldn’t hear us
I didn’t want to lie on a table with my arms outstretched
like a metaphor for some abstract truth. And anyway
I couldn’t feel my arms, and as I lay there
outstretched and overnumbed by anesthesia,
for not a ritual, but a procedure, I thought,
oh well, the metaphor came for me after all.
Hannah Faith Notess is a poet and software product manager. Her first book of poems, The Multitude, won the Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press. She lives with her family in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she co-runs a poetry reading series, Yellow Chair Poetry, in her house. Learn more about her work at hannahnotess.com.